New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is releasing, Kaci Hickox, a nurse who recently returned from West Africa to her home state of Maine, where that state will decide how she should be monitored for Ebola. Returning residents of New Jersey will still be subject to a 21-day quarantine.
Meanwhile, the Joint Chiefs of Staff want all troops returning from West Africa to undergo a mandatory 21-day quarantine, putting them at odds with President Obama.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calls talks with the U. S. on Iran’s nuclear program “useless.”
I agree with him. There’s no diplomatic solution here, just a military one.
The NYT describes how, when the Kurdish pesh merga retook the town of Gwer, ISIS had hidden three trucks with machine guns north of the town to attack the Kurdish fighters from the rear. But when the trucks appeared, they were blown up by U. S. air strikes. If we hadn’t been there, the Kurds would have been ambushed and slaughtered.
So we’re finally arming the Kurds. At this point, it appears that the weapons are coming from the CIA, but plans are in the works for the Pentagon to supply them directly, rather than sending weapons to Baghdad that never ever get to the Kurds.
The Kurdish Peshmerga are as tough and determined as they come, but toughness and determination without weapons and ammo won’t win against ISIS and their captured state-of-the-art American weapons.
I’m tired of seeing this ISIS sweep falsely spun as an Iraqi civil war. This is a multi-state terror movement that must be destroyed. We need to go after ISIS full bore, not just to protect the Yazidis and Kurds and Baghdad, but on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border (such as it now is) and in Lebanon and Jordan.
The combination of intelligence failures about ISIS’ strength and a president who didn’t want to hear the news anyway have made the task much harder than it would have been if we’d nipped them in the bud. Now it’s time to mow them down before they flower further.
It’s not up to the Iraqi Shiites to get their act together because they can’t and won’t. It’s up to us to keep an enormous swath of the Middle East from falling to barbarians.
The deadline for nuclear talks with Iran was supposed to be tomorrow, July 20. In exchange for holding off on further sanctions, President Obama swore up and down to Congress that this was a firm deadline.
Now the deadline has been extended till November 24, which means Iran blithely continues its path to a nuclear weapon. What does Iran need most? Time. What did they just get? Time.
Look, if they had a delay of a week or two, that would be one thing. It would show they were close to a deal. (Whether it would be a smart deal for us is a different issue, but not one we face today.) But a four–month extension shows that we have nothing, that we’re just spinning our wheels, while they spin their centrifuges.
November 24 gets Obama past the mid-terms and to Thanksgiving when no one will be paying attention when they announce further failure and, God forbid, another absurd extension.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan says Israel is more barbaric than Hitler.
Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki announced today that he won’t be stopped from seeking a third term. So efforts to form a government will now go on forever….
Maliki’s short-sighted, non-inclusive rule — pro-Shiite and anti-Sunni — created the conditions for ISIS to grab much of northern and western Iraq. His refusal to go makes it easier for ISIS to stay.
It’s easy to say we backed the wrong guy all these years, but really, people, they’re all the wrong guy.
So John Kerry met Maliki in Baghdad. Kerry pushed for Maliki to give more power to the Sunnis. Maliki pressed for Obama to do airstrikes.
Meanwhile ISIS marches on.
As Iraq disintegrates, Dems are blaming Bush and Republicans are blaming Obama. And the same arguments will take place when we finally leave Afghanistan and that God-forsaken place falls apart.
But as we apportion blame, let’s not forget the British and the French.
One of the huge problems we’ve had fighting in Afghanistan is that when we pursue the Taliban, they cross the border into Pakistan, where our ability to follow them is severely restricted. The Afghans have a save haven there because the people are Pashtun on both sides of the border. Rather than think of themselves as Afghans or Pakistanis, they think of themselves primarily as Pashtuns. A sensible border would have all the Pashtuns living in the same country, but noooooo. Back in 1893, a British colonial official created the Durand Line to separate British India from Afghanistan. When that part of India became Pakistan in 1947, the absurd border remained, irrationally dividing the Pashtuns.
As for Iraq, the British and French arbitrarily drew the Sykes-Picot line in 1916 (and implemented it after WWI), which falsely divided Ottoman Empire territory into Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, separating Sunni tribes with a purely artificial border. The Iraq side was for the British, and the Syrian-Lebanese side was for the French, with no regard for the Sunnis who should have been assigned to the same country. If ISIS weren’t welcomed and joined by Maliki-hating Sunnis as they come from Syria into Iraq, they wouldn’t have been able to make the swift conquest they have.
And don’t get me started on the Kurds, who have really gotten the short end of the stick. They are a distinct people, Muslim, but not Arab. They should have an independent Kurdistan (and maybe will when this mess get resolved) that unites the Kurds now divided among Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria.
From my reading on Iraq, it seems that the President isn’t thinking about air strikes, but has decided to do them, and is waiting for up-to-date intelligence and a better sense of the lay of the land.
It also seems pretty clear that those air strikes won’t just be in Iraq, but will be in Syria too.
We seem to be proceeding on two tracks — a military track using air power and a political track to get Maliki ousted.
Embattled Farmers 