Saturday 30 August 2014

Iraq War: Version 3.0

It all makes a bit more sense today as John Kerry announces that air strikes won't be enough to stop ISIS and he will use next week’s NATO summit to seek to 'enlist the broadest possible assistance' which makes sense of why the UK upped the security threat to the second highest level yesterday. 
It is Iraq War version 3 but this time we are on the same side as the Iraqi's fighting against people armed with the equipment we left after Iraq War version 2.
John Kerry said he would ask some countries to provide direct military assistance while others would provide humanitarian assistance so who can we expect to be in America's new version of the coalition of the willing?
It is a dead certainty that the UK will be at it's tail wagging, panting best beside America, the way was paved by Dave Cameron bizarrely calling ISIS the greatest threat that the UK has known which ignores recent history and a certain mustachioed Austrian.
The last time America, under Bush, went after a coalition of the willing to fight in Iraq it managed to scrape up the military powerhouses of Estonia, Moldova, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Fiji Islands and El Salvador so Kerry may have a job on his hands to persuade other countries to commit it's forces to fight in a conflict that is blow back from the last coalitions actions.    
The big boys, Russia and China, will give America short thrift so it's Canada and Australia along with a dozen Albanians.
Iran and Syria who were in the US sights this time last year will be asked to come along and whatever can be salvaged from the Iraqi army and the Kurdish Peshmarga army but as the USA has just thrown further sanctions at Iran, it might not be as cooperative as it could be so the US has essentially handcuffed itself in cooperating with anyone that it can.
Now all we need is the requisite speeches by Kerry, Obama and Cameron and a deadline to be ignored and we can do it all again for a third time with the same countries who made such a horrendous disaster of things the previous times.

4 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
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Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
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Unknown said...

It's remarkable the US ability to destroy countries but its disability to win a war: Iraq, Afghanistan, they never have been stabilized since their invasions

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.