Sunday, May 01, 2016

Shiite Protesters Storm Iraqi Parliament

by JASmius



It took five years for the Bush Administration to pacify and secure Iraq, but they were finally successful.  Then Barack Obama came to power and threw it all away, consigning the country to Iranian vassalhood and eventually being largely conquered by the Islamic State.

At this point, I have to say that, though the man is an idiot, Joe Biden's one-time proposal to partition Iraq into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish sub-countries is starting to not look as ridiculously defeatist as it once did:

Iraq declared a state of emergency in Baghdad after supporters of Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr stormed parliament, the Interior Ministry said, but Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said late Saturday the city's Green Zone was under control, Fox News reported.

Mobile-phone video footage broadcast on Iraqi news channel al-Sharqiya showed hundreds of al-Sadr’s supporters inside the legislature on Saturday.

Why did al-Sadroids do such a thing?  Because their leader told them to.

And it's not difficult to guess why:

Al-Sadr earlier on Saturday accused lawmakers of sectarianism in their selection of ministers and ordered his bloc to withdraw from the parliament session where members were preparing to finish voting on a new cabinet.

In other words, too much accommodation was being made to Sunnis and Kurds in the upcoming cabinet selections in al-Sadr's august estimation and so he decided to pull a Trump.

And, sure enough....

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who has pledged to give minority Sunnis and Kurds a bigger role in the Shiite-dominated government, has faced resistance to an effort to replace politicians in key roles with technocrats.

As the Obama Regime has "smart diplomacied" him into attempting, which could only piss off the Shiites at the same time that it would be considered insufficient by the Sunnis and Kurds, because these three groups do not want to share power or live together in the same country, and every successive attempt to shove them together, like moldy cheese, a rotten banana, and a container of yogurt three weeks past its expiration date in the back of a refrigerator -  or "the establishment," Trumplicans, and constitutional conservatives in the same political party - is doomed to failure and just makes the disharmony and strife worse.

Prime Minister al-Abadi and House Speaker Paul Ryan could probably relate to each other very well and closely:

He’s also under fire for his handling of a financial crisis and charges of government corruption. Parliament canceled its session earlier this month after a failed vote on whether to retain its embattled speaker.

Iraq's today is America's - or the GOP's, anyway - tomorrow.  Although is sure sounds like today, doesn't it?

And we are, evidently, bugging out, judging by the White House's vehement denials of same:

The U.S. Embassy is monitoring the situation, it said in an e-mailed statement....

That's all they ever seem to do - "monitor".  They never do anything about what they're "monitoring".  Just....monitor.  Sit there, passively, five-knuckle-shuffling.

Until it's time to evacuate, anyway:

....adding that reports that embassy personnel are being evacuated are inaccurate. The highly fortified Green Zone houses most of the country’s ministries and foreign embassies.

Which means they're fleeing as we speak.

“Under the Vienna Convention, all diplomatic missions are protected by the host country’s security forces,” it said. “We have full confidence that the Iraqi Security Forces will meet its obligations.” [emphasis added]

Which is why they're evacuating.

Will The One do anything else besides running away?  What do you think?

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is "toast" after anti-government protesters climbed over walls and stormed parliament on Saturday — threatening all efforts to [pretend to] destroy the Islamic State — and any intervention by the Obama administration will "just be political Band-Aids to address a significant problem," retired Army Colonel Derek Harvey told Newsmax.

"Prime Minister al-Abadi is toast — and whether he remains prime minister or not, he's no longer effective," Harvey said in an interview. "Al-Abadi's days are numbered."...

He called the protests, led by hundreds of supporters of Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a "coup" that creates a "competing center of power now that directly challenges the government and puts at risk everything we have been trying to do in working with them to [pretend to] fight ISIS." [emphasis added]

And that is why we're still not-fighting ISIS almost two years later, even if you go on the premise that defeating the world's mightiest jihadist army is actually Barack Obama's intention.  "Working with" a country that doesn't functionally exist anymore can only hamstring us, impede the reaching of our objectives, and as a practical matter keep feeding U.S. military equipment to the Islamic State after every "Iraqi Army" retreat.  There is, plainly and simply and again, no way to destroy the Islamic State short of a second full-scale invasion of Iraq that rolls into Syria and cleans out and eradicates the entire nest.  Not relying upon incompetent proxies, not nuking them and quite likely igniting Armageddon, as Donald Trump implied last week and the Director dismayingly and overtly suggested yesterday,  U.S. boots on the ground, and plenty of 'em.

Which, of course, we couldn't do if Obama wanted to, because we don't have enough troops or equipment to mount a second invasion of Iraq anyway.

And as I discussed the other day with regard to the nuclear non-option:

U.S. policy for over half a century has been that (1) we do not use nukes first and (2) we neither use nor threaten to use them against non-nuclear countries.

Not a "lack of balls," Director, unless yours are filled with lunacy instead of fortitude.  That was frankly a profoundly stupid and morally abhorrent thing to say, since what your friend, the late Tim "Loki" Kerlin, was advocating by a Blackbeard-ish "KILL 'EM ALL!" policy against the Muslim world sure looks like the definition of "genocide" that I learned in school, and defeating the Global Jihad does not require us to become them.  Remember the "strong horse/weak horse" dynamic?  We're not talking World War Z here.  They can be sent back into "Allah wants us to wait" hibernation.  They can be beaten without having to wade through oceans of irradiated blood to do it.

Get some Christian perspective back, brother.

Which means that the Islamic State would need to (1) nuke us and (2) would have to be proven to have been behind the attack before we could retaliate in kind. But that brings up the second problem of ISIS not being a recognized nation-state, in which case that retaliation in kind would constitute nuking Syria and Iraq (at the very least), neither of with which the U.S. is at war and neither of which is a member of the "nuclear club".

Third....such a retaliation in kind would, in both blast and radioactive fallout affects, cause massive collateral damage against innocents, likely much more than ISIS itself would suffer, since they intermix themselves with their captive subject populations.

Fourth....the risks of igniting a larger nuclear war with Iran and especially Russia (both of whose ally would have had its territory and citizens nuked) from such a retaliation in kind would grow enormously.

Barack Obama might or might not attempt to apply "bandaids" to Haider al-Abadi's "toastedness," but that's all he can do, because he has stripped us of any other means of influencing the world beyond our borders.  We are the pitiful, helpless giant of President Nixon's one-time depiction.

And that giant is ripping itself apart, until there will be nothing left.

Hell, in a lot of ways, the "Iraqis" might be better off than we are.

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