What Hagel thinks of BO's JV

H

Horn6721

Hook'em
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel offering a pretty sobering assessment of the group BO labeled " JV"
from link
"US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned Thursday that the Islamic State is more than a traditional "terrorist group" and better armed, trained and funded than any recent threat.

"They marry ideology and a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess. They are tremendously well funded. This is beyond anything we have seen," Hagel told reporters.The Link

How will this supporters spin this so BO doesn't look like the dangerous inept buffoon he is?
Do they denounce Hagel's opinion?
Do they reinterpret BO's remarks?
Too bad BO can't be benched. he has shown he can't play in that "JV" league
and it is hurting us.
 
What happened between January when Obama made those comments and Hagel's comments now?

ISIS has been underestimated by most of the world, most importantly the Iraqi's. Of course, here is Obama's full quote:

In reply to:
Click to expand...
 
Indeed what happened between Jan and June
Since Bo so easily dismissed them it is obvious he didn't pay attention to what was going on.
Not interested in attacking USA?
So you and BO dismiss their declarations of plating their flag at the white house?

Remind us all why Foley was killed?
I bet BO doesn't think there could be any ISIS terrorists crossing our " secure "borders.

BO is dangerous to our national security.
 
According to R35 he has been doing things like dilly dallying, delaying, not making decisions, goofing off and playing golf which is keeping us out of war, also known as a very successful foreign relations policy.

Oops, there I go again showing my TP'er/Bircher mentality by thinking our Commanding nothing in Chief is an idiot.
 
Crock
What a crock!
We know supporters think BO is a deity who would calm the rising seas and create world peace.
People who live in the real world just want a POTUS who makes decisions based on something other than what helps him politically.

What did BO think those lines of military equipment and Humvees in the desert from Iraq to Syria were about?
Did BO think it was just bunch of toys for the JV?
What did he think ISIS was going to do with all that equipment?
Why did he ignore the warnings about ISIS growing stronger , esp. from GOP leaders in June who had to have heard the same Intel BO did.
When would it have been easiest to halt ISIS? When in early spring the Kurds ( who IIRC are in the region) warned BO and offered to help?( note BO didn't even respond) June?
or now?
BO didn't have to be "omniscient" to listen to and acknowledge the Kurds or listen to GOP leaders or understand the importance of our military equipment being trucked to Syria.

He just needed to do the job he swore to do instead of fund raising and golfing.
 
re: onmiscience- I remember Romney stating that Russia was our biggest geopolitical foe during a 2012 debate, and O snapping his fingers in a 'no you ditnt' manner and mocking him.

Turns out, Romney was the 'onmiscient' one.

Since omniscience and foresight are necessary to make the right calls in foreign diplomacy, isn't this one example of liberals admitting that Romney would have been a better President?
 
Dal
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and remember Romney said " geopolitical foe, not NK, not iran)
he made that statement in context with BO telling Mededev to tell Putin He, BO, would have 'more flexibility after he was elected.

and just as important, to this issue for sure is what Romney said about AlQ and other terrorists groups. after BO said they were no threat

Romney: This is a group that is now involved in 10 or 12 countries, and it presents an enormous threat to our friends, to the world, to America, long term, and we must have a comprehensive strategy to help reject this kind of extremism.

It is interesting that BO had to make sure he narrowed in on alQ in Pakistan only instead of looking at the big picture as Romney did.
Now AlQ is growing stronger particularly in N Africa.

Go tee off BO .
 
yes I realize that at that point in jan ISIS did not have all our weaponry.
neither did they have it when the Kurdish PM offered to join with US and Iraq to fight them
which would have prevented ISIS from getting the weaponry AND Mosul and the money>
BO didn't even respond to say NO thanks.".
Weary of war/ Good Lord yes
WE could have joined with others including the very competent and nasty Kurds to stop ISIS from going into Iraq

Now what do we do?
Do you doubt ISIS can find a way to attack here?
 
Why is it that whenever a liberal has no answer, they use blame Bush? Obama watched the JV march across Syria and Iraq and did nothing. Now air strikes are working and he needs to keep it up as long as needed for the Kurds to succeed. Burying your head in the sand and "not doing stupid things" is not good foreign policy. Unfortunately, it looks like he waited too long and ISIS has a foothold which will require ground troops.
 
How the US Helped Create ISIS
There are extraordinary elements in the present US policy in Iraq and Syria that are attracting surprisingly little attention. In Iraq, the US is carrying out air strikes and sending in advisers and trainers to help beat back the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (better known as ISIS) on the Kurdish capital, Erbil. The US would presumably do the same if ISIS surrounds or attacks Baghdad. But in Syria, Washington's policy is the exact opposite: there the main opponent of ISIS is the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds in their northern enclaves. Both are under attack from ISIS, which has taken about a third of the country, including most of its oil and gas production facilities.

But US, Western European, Saudi, and Arab Gulf policy is to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, which happens to be the policy of ISIS and other jihadis in Syria. If Assad goes, then ISIS will be the beneficiary, since it is either defeating or absorbing the rest of the Syrian armed opposition. There is a pretense in Washington and elsewhere that there exists a "moderate" Syrian opposition being helped by the US, Qatar, Turkey, and the Saudis. It is, however, weak and getting more so by the day. Soon the new caliphate may stretch from the Iranian border to the Mediterranean and the only force that can possibly stop this from happening is the Syrian army.

The reality of US policy is to support the government of Iraq, but not Syria, against ISIS. But one reason that group has been able to grow so strong in Iraq is that it can draw on its resources and fighters in Syria. Not everything that went wrong in Iraq was the fault of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as has now become the political and media consensus in the West. Iraqi politicians have been telling me for the last two years that foreign backing for the Sunni revolt in Syria would inevitably destabilize their country as well. This has now happened.

By continuing these contradictory policies in two countries, the US has ensured that ISIS can reinforce its fighters in Iraq from Syria and vice versa. So far, Washington has been successful in escaping blame for the rise of ISIS by putting all the blame on the Iraqi government. In fact, it has created a situation in which ISIS can survive and may well flourish.

Using the al-Qa'ida Label

The sharp increase in the strength and reach of jihadist organizations in Syria and Iraq has generally been unacknowledged until recently by politicians and media in the West. A primary reason for this is that Western governments and their security forces narrowly define the jihadist threat as those forces directly controlled by al-Qa'ida central or "core" al-Qa'ida. This enables them to present a much more cheerful picture of their successes in the so-called war on terror than the situation on the ground warrants.

In fact, the idea that the only jihadis to be worried about are those with the official blessing of al-Qa'ida is naïve and self-deceiving. It ignores the fact, for instance, that ISIS has been criticized by the al-Qa'ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for its excessive violence and sectarianism. After talking to a range of Syrian jihadi rebels not directly affiliated with al-Qa'ida in southeast Turkey earlier this year, a source told me that "without exception they all expressed enthusiasm for the 9/11 attacks and hoped the same thing would happen in Europe as well as the US"

Jihadi groups ideologically close to al-Qa'ida have been relabeled as moderate if their actions are deemed supportive of US policy aims. In Syria, the Americans backed a plan by Saudi Arabia to build up a "Southern Front" based in Jordan that would be hostile to the Assad government in Damascus, and simultaneously hostile to al-Qa'ida-type rebels in the north and east. The powerful but supposedly moderate Yarmouk Brigade, reportedly the planned recipient of anti-aircraft missiles from Saudi Arabia, was intended to be the leading element in this new formation. But numerous videos show that the Yarmouk Brigade has frequently fought in collaboration with JAN, the official al-Qa'ida affiliate. Since it was likely that, in the midst of battle, these two groups would share their munitions, Washington was effectively allowing advanced weaponry to be handed over to its deadliest enemy. Iraqi officials confirm that they have captured sophisticated arms from ISIS fighters in Iraq that were originally supplied by outside powers to forces considered to be anti-al-Qa'ida in Syria.
The name al-Qa'ida has always been applied flexibly when identifying an enemy. In 2003 and 2004 in Iraq, as armed Iraqi opposition to the American and British-led occupation mounted, US officials attributed most attacks to al-Qa'ida, though many were carried out by nationalist and Baathist groups. Propaganda like this helped to persuade nearly 60% of US voters prior to the Iraq invasion that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and those responsible for 9/11, despite the absence of any evidence for this. In Iraq itself, indeed throughout the entire Muslim world, these accusations have benefited al-Qa'ida by exaggerating its role in the resistance to the US and British occupation.

Precisely the opposite PR tactics were employed by Western governments in 2011 in Libya, where any similarity between al-Qa'ida and the NATO-backed rebels fighting to overthrow the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was played down. Only those jihadis who had a direct operational link to the al-Qa'ida "core" of Osama bin Laden were deemed to be dangerous. The falsity of the pretense that the anti-Gaddafi jihadis in Libya were less threatening than those in direct contact with al-Qa'ida was forcefully, if tragically, exposed when US ambassador Chris Stevens was killed by jihadi fighters in Benghazi in September 2012. These were the same fighters lauded by Western governments and media for their role in the anti-Gaddafi uprising.


Imagining al-Qa'ida as the Mafia

Al-Qa'ida is an idea rather than an organization, and this has long been the case. For a five-year period after 1996, it did have cadres, resources, and camps in Afghanistan, but these were eliminated after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Subsequently, al-Qa'ida's name became primarily a rallying cry, a set of Islamic beliefs, centering on the creation of an Islamic state, the imposition of sharia, a return to Islamic customs, the subjugation of women, and the waging of holy war against other Muslims, notably the Shia, who are considered heretics worthy of death. At the center of this doctrine for making war is an emphasis on self-sacrifice and martyrdom as a symbol of religious faith and commitment. This has resulted in using untrained but fanatical believers as suicide bombers, to devastating effect.

It has always been in the interest of the US and other governments that al-Qa'ida be viewed as having a command-and-control structure like a mini-Pentagon, or like the mafia in America. This is a comforting image for the public because organized groups, however demonic, can be tracked down and eliminated through imprisonment or death. More alarming is the reality of a movement whose adherents are self-recruited and can spring up anywhere.

Osama bin Laden's gathering of militants, which he did not call al-Qa'ida until after 9/11, was just one of many jihadi groups 12 years ago. But today its ideas and methods are predominant among jihadis because of the prestige and publicity it gained through the destruction of the Twin Towers, the war in Iraq, and its demonization by Washington as the source of all anti-American evil. These days, there is a narrowing of differences in the beliefs of jihadis, regardless of whether or not they are formally linked to al-Qa'ida central.
Unsurprisingly, governments prefer the fantasy picture of al-Qa'ida because it enables them to claim victories when it succeeds in killing its better known members and allies. Often, those eliminated are given quasi-military ranks, such as "head of operations," to enhance the significance of their demise. The culmination of this heavily publicized but largely irrelevant aspect of the "war on terror" was the killing of bin Laden in Abbottabad in Pakistan in 2011. This enabled President Obama to grandstand before the American public as the man who had presided over the hunting down of al-Qa'ida's leader. In practical terms, however, his death had little impact on al-Qa'ida-type jihadi groups, whose greatest expansion has occurred subsequently.


Ignoring the Roles of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan

The key decisions that enabled al-Qa'ida to survive, and later to expand, were made in the hours immediately after 9/11. Almost every significant element in the project to crash planes into the Twin Towers and other iconic American buildings led back to Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was a member of the Saudi elite, and his father had been a close associate of the Saudi monarch. Citing a CIA report from 2002, the official 9/11 report says that al-Qa'ida relied for its financing on "a variety of donors and fundraisers, primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia."

The report's investigators repeatedly found their access limited or denied when seeking information in Saudi Arabia. Yet President George W. Bush apparently never even considered holding the Saudis responsible for what happened. An exit of senior Saudis, including bin Laden relatives, from the US was facilitated by the US government in the days after 9/11. Most significant, 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report about the relationship between the attackers and Saudi Arabia were cut and never published, despite a promise by President Obama to do so, on the grounds of national security.

In 2009, eight years after 9/11, a cable from the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, revealed by WikiLeaks, complained that donors in Saudi Arabia constituted the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. But despite this private admission, the US and Western Europeans continued to remain indifferent to Saudi preachers whose message, spread to millions by satellite TV, YouTube, and Twitter, called for the killing of the Shia as heretics. These calls came as al-Qa'ida bombs were slaughtering people in Shia neighborhoods in Iraq. A sub-headline in another State Department cable in the same year reads: "Saudi Arabia: Anti-Shi'ism as Foreign Policy?" Now, five years later, Saudi-supported groups have a record of extreme sectarianism against non-Sunni Muslims.

Pakistan, or rather Pakistani military intelligence in the shape of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was the other parent of al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, and jihadi movements in general. When the Taliban was disintegrating under the weight of US bombing in 2001, its forces in northern Afghanistan were trapped by anti-Taliban forces. Before they surrendered, hundreds of ISI members, military trainers, and advisers were hastily evacuated by air. Despite the clearest evidence of ISI's sponsorship of the Taliban and jihadis in general, Washington refused to confront Pakistan, and thereby opened the way for the resurgence of the Taliban after 2003, which neither the US nor NATO has been able to reverse.

The "war on terror" has failed because it did not target the jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries that fostered jihadism as a creed and a movement. The US did not do so because these countries were important American allies whom it did not want to offend. Saudi Arabia is an enormous market for American arms, and the Saudis have cultivated, and on occasion purchased, influential members of the American political establishment. Pakistan is a nuclear power with a population of 180 million and a military with close links to the Pentagon.

The spectacular resurgence of al-Qa'ida and its offshoots has happened despite the huge expansion of American and British intelligence services and their budgets after 9/11. Since then, the US, closely followed by Britain, has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and adopted procedures normally associated with police states, such as imprisonment without trial, rendition, torture, and domestic espionage. Governments wage the "war on terror" claiming that the rights of individual citizens must be sacrificed to secure the safety of all.

In the face of these controversial security measures, the movements against which they are aimed have not been defeated but rather have grown stronger. At the time of 9/11, al-Qa'ida was a small, generally ineffectual organization; by 2014 al-Qa'ida-type groups were numerous and powerful.

In other words, the "war on terror," the waging of which has shaped the political landscape for so much of the world since 2001, has demonstrably failed. Until the fall of Mosul, nobody paid much attention
 
Croc
serious question;
if the Kurdish leader cam to you and said his troops along with Iraqi troops would join with USA to fight ISIS, a terror group that had by the time the offer was made had growth significantly in size and power and ruthlessness, a Terror group that many in your own DOD had said should be taken seriously
Croc does it take hindsight to understand that at the very least BO could have responded to the Kurds?
Does it take hindsight to notice lines of vehicles with weaponry and Humvees streaming across the desert from Iraq into Syria? Do you think our satelites missed that or do you think no one told BO?


Finding out BO was playing golf at the time of Major General Green's funeral should tell us all we need to know about BO as a leader.
 
The article that Musburger posted has some great points IMO. We will never defeat the ideology with our military. It will just take on a different acronym. The best way to handle this is to establish PERMANENT bases in the ME....and start out from the beginning saying that these are 50 yr commitments. Two generations...that is what it takes to change a culture.

In the short run we have a holding action based on special ops/limited ground troops whose only responsibility is to destabilize and break organizations like ISIS/taliban/AQ before they get a full head of steam. We don't lead in the security of a nation, we don't try to stabilize the whole country, we simply keep the bad guys off balance and scattered.

In addition, we establish an area in Iraq that works like Hong Kong. It is a free economic zone based on US system of laws. We build it where there is nothing else going so we aren't accused of forcing anyone to comply. They move there if they want US style life, they don't move in if they want traditional Islamic life.

Based on the number or Middle easterners that have fled to Europe and other places I think we could build a new and thriving city in the desert in 15 years.

Establishing a permanent base of 10K troops will be a heck of lot cheaper and more meaningful than this tactic we've been trying for the last 14 yrs.

I was in Iraq and AFG and the one thing you kept hearing the bad guys say was that the US was going to be gone in 3 yrs. AQ/Taliban etc would be here forever.
 
Horn6721-

At the time, the Iraq army and Kurds appeared to be more than a match for ISIS. That is until the Iraqi army dropped their weapons and turned tail. The Iraqi army severely outnumbered and had ISIS outgunned. Only after ISIS "inherited" the US armaments did they become the foe they are today.

This all begs the question of who to arm in the ME? At any point the weapons of "allies" can easily be turned against our interests. On some level this validates the Obama Admins trepidation of arming the Syrian rebels. Why is the morale of these US trained armies so poor that they'd run at the first sign of conflict (Iraq and Afghanistan to a lesser degree)? In Iraq they aren't fighting back with formal armies but rather Kurds and Shia militias.

Unfortunately, ISIS is losing ground to the Assad regime in Syria because of their move into Iraq. Despite being the most well armed and funded jihadist group in the world, they still have limited resources. We need to ensure they don't get more heavy weaponry and potentially destroy those they have. We need to turn them back into a guerilla fighting or force them to take the heavy armor back into Syria to fight Assad.
 
If the Kurds and Iraqis were such a good match WHY did the Kurd leader implore BO for help? and why wouldn't BO have the courtesy to at least respond?

There is no one in the civilized world who wants more war
and certainly no one in USA or UK.
but as PM Cameron pointed out
"This is not a war of choice. They are cash rich and have a plentiful ­supply of arms. If we don’t go after them, they will soon come after us."

does anyone doubt that?
 
Here is my problem with the viewpoint I think you are espousing on this thread. You are mixing hindsight with current knowledge as if we knew then what we know now. Simply put, ISIS was a growing regional fundamentalist org that seemed intent on taking Syria down.

They went from partnering with the various rebel factions early on in the Syrian civil war to competing with them. In January, nobody expected they were going to try to fight a 2-front war. The universal concern at that point was whether arms given to moderate factions would ultimately end up in ISIS hands if Assad was overthrown. ISIS was well armed in relation to the other rebel factions but still vastly under-armed in comparison to the Syrian army.

It was only after their blitzkrieg into Iraq that their outlook shifted. If reports are to be believed, they went from living on the borders of Iraq to Mosul with 10k soldiers within a week. The Iraq army has >50k soldiers with heavy weaponry that literally dropped their weapons and ran when the ISIS black flags came over the horizon. I don't remember anyone predicting that? Do you?

Suddenly, ISIS went from a primarily small armed but well trained guerilla faction to a genuine army. The fact that Iraqi Sunni's and the former Baathist military machine joined up with ISIS accelerated their power growth beyond any prognostications. For the moment they have local backing and well trained military personnel to operate the heavy weaponry.

So, I'd agree that we certainly need to do something about ISIS. Now that they have the military equipment we donated to Iraq, they are a very formidable foe. I don't have an answer on what to do though. Simply attacking ISIS as a military opponent will ultimately prove to be a failure. I agree with the article above that we are fighting an ideology. One that can attract a 23yr British rapper from an upscale London neighborhood into an ideology that has him beheading "infidels". Simply bombing a bunch of jihadists isn't the answer.

I think we need to face the source of the problem, the funding mechanism of the jihadists and that is our ME allies. They are working against us in many ways. Saudi Arabia, Quatar, and other Sunni states are waging a jihad against the Shia through their proxies ISIS and those of their ilk. At some point we need to come to the realization that our allies may actually be our enemies. At the very least the enemies of our interests, a stable ME that produces lots of oil at a low price. Heck, the oil men in those countries like the instability if only because it drives up the cost of a finite resource making them wealthy beyond all of our imaginations.
 
I apologize 6721 for not responding in a substantive way.

Thanks Seattle Husker, for addressing the issues well.

We all have limited foresight. Hindsight can be helpful but it only provides so much information as we tread towards the future. Even with all of our media and all of our intelligence, we're imperfectly sorting through the good, the bad and the ugly. Even the good are not overly attractive in the middle east.
 
lets give BO a pass for ignoring intelligence reports since we only have unnamed sources saying h was briefed on ISIS or ISIL as far back as Dec 2013.
But a call from the Kurds was not hindsight. it was in the moment. BO didn't even respond
and those trucks and Humvees heading to Syria from Iraq were not hindsight, they were right there to be seen. That was USA equipment .
One wonders what BO thought the 'rebels" were going to do with our equipment.

If BO had acted in some way in June when GOP leaders called for it and we knew ISIS was a real threat how many lies could have been saved, maybe even James Foley.

But it is all hindsight now.
So the real questions are; does BO understand the threat if ISIS now?
and what will he/should he do?
No one wants war, except maybe the islamists.
Do we have choices?
what are they?
If we don't act now in another2-3 mons we might lament " in hindsight" not doing anything now
 
I'm only speaking for myself but the hindsight was tying Obama's "JV" comment made in January to the current form of ISIS. A lot has happened since that time that resulted in them certainly being a "varsity" team.

Does BO understand the ISIS threat now? Shouldn't Hagel's comments be taken as representative of the administration? He was speaking on behalf of them. Afterall, he's a civilian appointed by BO.

What do you propose we do? Had we followed some of the conservative's (i.e. Graham and McCain) we'd have armed the Syrian rebels long ago. I'm not sure about you but I suspect those arms would also now be in the hands of ISIS had we done so.
 
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