RugbyRebels

rowan wrote:

Digby wrote:

rowan wrote:About Obama creating ISIS, where do you think they got all those Toyotas from? Japan?

I think Trump says a lot of stupid things then suddenly comes out with something logical - like the invasion of Iraq was wrong, or Obama created ISIS - and we're all supposed to pooh pooh that is well because it's Trump speaking. Nice ploy, but it only works on stupid people.

You think Obama created ISIS well ahead of becoming president in anticipation of amongst other things a future need to supply them Toyotas?

No, I think he created them by sending in rebels to destabilize Syria as a pretext for regime change.

Digby wrote:

rowan wrote:

Digby wrote:
You think Obama created ISIS well ahead of becoming president in anticipation of amongst other things a future need to supply them Toyotas?

No, I think he created them by sending in rebels to destabilize Syria as a pretext for regime change.

Well the predate Obama, though you may simply be saying Obama to mean to the US President, or perhaps the CIA, or you may mean Obama advanced their cause/situation. It's a pretty offensive thing to suggest, it's not a hard conspiracy theory to follow about wanting boots on the ground, unstable regimes and access to oil across the region, but I'd judge there to be nothing in Obama's character about creating ISIS given their brutality

Story highlights

Peter Bergen: There's little factual support for Donald Trump's claim that the President and ex-secretary of state enabled rise of ISISHe says four factors, largely outside of U.S. control, gave rise to ISIS

Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of the forthcoming book "United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists."

(CNN)Donald Trump said on Saturday that President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "created ISIS."

Like many of Trump's charges this one doesn't hold much water. Clinton left the State Department in January 2013 and ISIS wasn't even founded until three months later.

But Trump's charge does raise an interesting question, which is how best to assign responsibility for the rise of ISIS, including the issue of how might the Obama administration's exit from Iraq at the end of 2011 have helped smooth the path for ISIS?

It began with a thug

The rise of ISIS starts with a Jordanian thug named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who founded ISIS' parent organization, al Qaeda in Iraq.

It was Zarqawi who inaugurated al Qaeda in Iraq's televised beheadings with the killing of American businessman Nick Berg in 2004. And it was Zarqawi who ignited a civil war against the Shiites in Iraq the same year. These tactics and policies remain today at the core of ISIS.


What gave Zarqawi the opportunity to create al Qaeda in Iraq? It was, of course, George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein brutally repressed all forms of opposition to his regime and before the Iraq War al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq.

Al Qaeda in Iraq grew in strength in 2006 so that it controlled much of the massive Anbar province in western Iraq. At the beginning of 2007, Bush authorized a surge of new troops and brought in a new commander, David Petraeus. Allied with a movement of Sunni tribesmen angered by al Qaeda known as "the Awakening," U.S. troops had largely extirpated al Qaeda from Iraq by 2008.

The 4 big factors

So how did al Qaeda in Iraq surge back as ISIS?


There are four big factors. The first is the Syrian civil war, which launched in 2011 in reaction to President Bashar al-Assad's brutal repression of peaceful protests against his dictatorship. Elements of what would become ISIS traveled from Iraq into Syria to fight against Assad. Those forces gained strength in Syria, which they drew upon when they re-entered Iraq as a reinvigorated force in 2013, seizing much of Anbar a year later as well as Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq.

The second factor was the role that some of Hussein's former officer corps played in helping ISIS to its victories. A number of the late dictator's former commanders helped to professionalize ISIS as a fighting force. (The Bush administration's decision to disband the Iraqi army in 2003 had helped push some Iraqi officers to join Sunni militant groups.)

The third factor was the feckless and incompetent rule of then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who marginalized Sunnis and disenfranchised them from Iraq's political process to the point that many Sunnis preferred the rule of the Islamist militants in ISIS to that of the "Shia" government in Baghdad. Inexplicably, the Obama White House Kept backing Maliki despite his manifest flaws as a leader.

The fourth factor was the hollowing out of the Iraqi army, which simply ran away as ISIS made its most dramatic advances during the first half of 2014. The Iraqi army was poorly led, poorly paid and riven with corruption.

None of these factors can be easily ascribed to Obama or to Clinton, although certainly they did preside over the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq at the end of 2011, a plan bequeathed to them by Bush.

'JV' team?

Could the Obama administration have fought harder to retain a U.S. troop presence in Iraq? Possibly.

Would the Iraqi government have allowed such a presence? Not likely as the Iraq government was by the time of the U.S. withdrawal more aligned with Iran than with the United States.

Obama was also slow to recognize the threat posed by ISIS, famously referring to the Islamist terrorist group gaining ground in Syria and Iraq as a "JV" team in a January 2014 interview.

Since the summer of 2014 the Obama administration has mounted -- at least from the air -- an aggressive campaign against ISIS, but it has proven reluctant to do much on the ground.

Could more be done? Yes. More U.S. Special Forces fighting side by side with Iraqi forces and more U.S. forward air controllers calling in close air support would certainly help the Iraqi military against ISIS.

In Syria, a no-fly zone targeted at Assad's air force and safe zones for refugees fleeing the fighting would help tamp down the death toll that plays into the hands of ISIS and other Sunni militants who can position themselves as the only groups that are really defending the Sunni population.

Rather than making loose and unsubstantiated claims that Obama and Clinton created ISIS, it would behoove Trump if he advanced some real policy ideas about how to solve the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars. Of course, to do that he would have to get beyond the inflammatory slogans and sound bites that have characterized his campaign.

canta_brian wrote:How did this thread become another Rowan rant about Obama?

canta_brian wrote:How did this thread become another Rowan rant about Obama?

cashead wrote:Paul Manafort, who is heading Trump's flagging campaign, has just been implicated in the Ukraine, where their National Anti-Corruption Bureau claims to have found secret, handwritten ledgers by Yanukovych amounting to around US$13 million (rounded up) during his time working with the Party of Regions.

It's particularly damaging at a time when the campaign is already seen as being in meltdown mode, not even a month after the Republican National Convention, where Trump formally accepted the nomination.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/po ... trump.html

rowan wrote:Al Qaeda, like ISIS, was an invention of the media; a blanket term to cover all Saudi-backed Jihadists, because they did not want to implicate their faithful allies directly, as well as Islamic terrorists abroad, and thereby a convenient excuse for US military involvement through the Middle East. But that one wore thin, so Al Qaeda was rebranded as ISIS.

rowan wrote:Al Qaeda, like ISIS, was an invention of the media; a blanket term to cover all Saudi-backed Jihadists, because they did not want to implicate their faithful allies directly, as well as Islamic terrorists abroad, and thereby a convenient excuse for US military involvement through the Middle East. But that one wore thin, so Al Qaeda was rebranded as ISIS.

rowan wrote:First paragraph was enough to tell me this was silly propaganda, attempting to link the so-called 'Arab Spring' protests to the heavily militarized rebellion that began at the other end of the country, and quickly became outright terrorism.

Sandydragon wrote:

rowan wrote:First paragraph was enough to tell me this was silly propaganda, attempting to link the so-called 'Arab Spring' protests to the heavily militarized rebellion that began at the other end of the country, and quickly became outright terrorism.

Strange that a good few sources claim that the Syrian uprising emerged from local protests over farming, which were boosted by the huge perceived change process that was the Arab Spring. Of course what would the witness know, he was only an eye witness after all.

of course, that narrative doesn't blame the US or Nato for interfering and arranging a rebellion.

rowan wrote:Syria was on America's hit-list even before the invasion of Iraq. Here's the evidence, straight from the horse's own mouth:



Obviously you'd rather believe Assad started it all with his brutal response to Arab Spring protestors, but those students, teachers and doctors did not suddenly morph into heavily-militarized insurgents pouring in fromt the north - and whom the US has freely admitted to training and arming, btw. Doh!