Agree 100%. The problem is that our government has an unstated interest in the Crimea that they won't let go.
Bonus points for the humanitarian food drops in Iraq for those refugees trapped on a mountain imho. If Isil get to Irbil the hundreds of US citizens there will be beheaded too, probably in public, so keep going on the bombing imho. Should have kept back some cluster bombs just for this sort of scenario.
Iraq’s new president named a new prime minister on Monday, despite current prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's refusal to leave office. Prominent Shiite politician and current deputy speaker of parliament Haider al-Abadi will take over from al-Maliki, who has spent the last eight years in office. “Now the Iraqi people are in your hands,” Massoum told Abadi as they shook hands in a ceremony in Baghdad. On Sunday, al-Maliki announced on Iraqi television that he would go to court against the country’s president, Fouad Masoum, to keep his premiership after Masoum failed to direct him and his bloc in parliament to form a new government. “What is happening today is a coup against the constitution, a deliberate violation of it by the president,” he said in a statement. I wonder if he's going to handcuff himself to the furniture . . .
Fair play and accepting the will of democracy haven't really jelled for that region yet - maybe another century or 2.
Democracy won't go far when you have distinct tribes that want nothing to do with each other. After a hundred years, the US still hasn't figured this out.
I think of this problem along the lines of my workplace. We have a lot of diversity here, race, gender, religion, nationality, and I'm sure many folks would not care to mix with others on their own time. But here during business hours we have a common purpose and people get along well enough to git 'er done. Edit: and the diversity is actually a strength in this context, since it bears the fruit of many perspectives, approaches, and ideas.
Eventually they will either work it out or destroy themselves. This may be what was in the world's mind when this ISIS business got started. And if they'd left the Kurds alone, everyone may have let it move toward its own conclusion. But genocide is still a no-no, and though some continue to get away with it, ISIS is not part of that club. It's interesting to speculate how everything would have worked out if the Allies had kept their noses out of it after WW1. But that area had the oil, and we wanted it. So . . .