Middle East Thread

[Anubis]

Justin Lee Collins. It'd be called 'bring back the original regime'. He could also dole out a few slaps.

 

"Colonel Mustaffa Wank was the head of the Special Republican Guard during the good old days but now works in Rapid in Swansea, we arranged to meet him at the hotel but he didn't turn up. Just as we're about to leave we get a phone call, he's going to be 30 minutes late because his boiler burst, he's on his way and we're all really excited."

 

Wouldn't Justin Lee Collins fit right in, as he likes abusing women as well....

[Section_31]

I think you'll find the Iraqi army already did that when they ran away and let them capture some Apache helicopters. Fortunately they don't know how to fly them.

Thank god most of these fuckers are probably too young to have played Desert Strike.

[Harry Squatter]

Hahaha

 

"We cant even go the dole coz its in fuckin baghdad"

Fuck crocky lad, this is Kirkuk

[stringvest]

Kirkuk?  D'you know Stanley Road?

[Section_31]

Cilla Black used to play out in Kirkuk, and sometimes her nan would give her tuppence for crisps and pop.

[Harry Squatter]

Kirkukside was a brilliant soap with the evil Bahman Grant terrorising everyone.

[Harry Squatter]

24 hour Ba'ath party people starring Steve Coogan as Saddam.

[Section_31]

24 hour Ba'ath party people starring Steve Coogan as Saddam.

Superb.

[stringvest]

Anaf Real was beheaded after kissing another woman.

[Mustangt125]

More British nationals are fighting in the Middle East for ISIS than are fighting for Britain or her allies.

 

I bet you a laaaarge percentage of the "Europeans" that are fighting for ISIS got a good chunk of your boys' tax money.

 

This is the kind of shit that happens when you let rampant radical Islam run wild.  Fight them there, or fight them at home. 

 

There's no being nice to these people and making friends like Obama said.  They didn't hate the west just cuz Bush was president, they hate our ideals, morals, and livelihoods.  Yes people have done awful things in the name of Christianity, as well.  When was the last time? Spanish Inquisition some hundreds of years ago? It's been happening in the name of Islam constantly here and now.

 

 

For all our sakes, I'll stop coming into this thread and leave you guys be.

[Stu Monty]

More British nationals are fighting in the Middle East for ISIS than are fighting for Britain or her allies.

 

I bet you a laaaarge percentage of the "Europeans" that are fighting for ISIS got a good chunk of your boys' tax money.

 

This is the kind of shit that happens when you let rampant radical Islam run wild.  Fight them there, or fight them at home. 

 

There's no being nice to these people and making friends like Obama said.  They didn't hate the west just cuz Bush was president, they hate our ideals, morals, and livelihoods.  Yes people have done awful things in the name of Christianity, as well.  When was the last time? Spanish Inquisition some hundreds of years ago? It's been happening in the name of Islam constantly here and now.

 

 

For all our sakes, I'll stop coming into this thread and leave you guys be.

 

Do you have some evidence for your claim that there are more Brits fighting in Isis than in the armed forces?

 

Because, you know, if you don't then everyone is pretty validated in thinking you're a bit of a clown.

[The Flâneur]

So

 

1) Something made up

 

2) Something else made up

 

3) Something ignorant

 

4) Something stupid

 

5) Something awesome

 

I'm going to choose 5.

[Jairzinho]

More British nationals are fighting in the Middle East for ISIS than are fighting for Britain or her allies.

 

I bet you a laaaarge percentage of the "Europeans" that are fighting for ISIS got a good chunk of your boys' tax money.

 

This is the kind of shit that happens when you let rampant radical Islam run wild.  Fight them there, or fight them at home. 

 

There's no being nice to these people and making friends like Obama said.  They didn't hate the west just cuz Bush was president, they hate our ideals, morals, and livelihoods.  Yes people have done awful things in the name of Christianity, as well.  When was the last time? Spanish Inquisition some hundreds of years ago? It's been happening in the name of Islam constantly here and now.

 

 

For all our sakes, I'll stop coming into this thread and leave you guys be.

 

Are you ok?

[Stu Monty]

I'll presume the point he was trying to make is that an MP is claiming that there are fewer Muslims in the armed forces than have left to join forces fighting in the Middle East.

 

Which, even if it were true, and not just a guess by one man, would rather beg the question of why 0.4% of the armed forced is Muslim and 4.3% of the population is. 

 

This would raise interesting, but complex, conversations; which Mustang would have no interest in.

 

One of "these people" that I was chatting to today about how great the UK is for its facilitating his business was obviously just waiting to go Jihad on my ass. Top Karahi though. To die for.

[dennis tooth]

More British nationals are fighting in the Middle East for ISIS than are fighting for Britain or her allies.

 

I bet you a laaaarge percentage of the "Europeans" that are fighting for ISIS got a good chunk of your boys' tax money.

 

This is the kind of shit that happens when you let rampant radical Islam run wild.  Fight them there, or fight them at home. 

 

There's no being nice to these people and making friends like Obama said.  They didn't hate the west just cuz Bush was president, they hate our ideals, morals, and livelihoods.  Yes people have done awful things in the name of Christianity, as well.  When was the last time? Spanish Inquisition some hundreds of years ago? It's been happening in the name of Islam constantly here and now.

 

 

For all our sakes, I'll stop coming into this thread and leave you guys be.

 

Well we know ISIS, Al Quaeda, Saddam Hussein and Suadia Arabia got all your tax dollars to fund them you arent fighting them, you armed them to fight assad thats why they are wearing US issue army boots, fatigues and rolling round in humvees and jeeps. Now there is talk they are going to join with Assad to fight the people they paid to fight Assad. 

Hamas was funded by Mossad (who are essentialy also bankrolled by the USA) too, in order to divide the PLO and Fatah.

 

It is without any question your tax dollars and pentagon morals which lead directly to this result, muslims havent been responsible for the cold war or this, the USA however is the consistent tumour on the world. They are dividing more and more amongst themselves, pentagon vs congress, cia vs fbi, president vs generals, there is strain in the empire. 

However you will not be fighting ISIS for the same reason you dont kill your employees, the USA bombed 4 vehicles that strayed too far as a warning to concentrate on butchering Iraqi people rather than taking too much territory, thats what the USA has paid them to do, some of them have been sacked but there will be no war with ISIS, they will stay around as long as they are doing the power broker's bidding and ensuring no peace in Iraq and terrorising the people again so there is no issue with us having our cheap oil forever, from saddam to alqueada to ISIS you will ensure your 'national interest' is put before any moral compunction. That includes risk to expendable US nationals.

[xerxes]

Looks as though. we will have to arm Assad, whom we were trying to depose a year ago, to defeat ISIS, whom we helped to arm to try to defeat Assad a year ago, confusing isn't it?

[Anubis]

Looks as though. we will have to arm Assad, whom we were trying to depose a year ago, to defeat ISIS, whom we helped to arm to try to defeat Assad a year ago, confusing isn't it?

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy, so my first enemy becomes my friend.

[Red Phoenix]

From The Independent. (and where's the US criticism of Turkey?)

 

 

 

Determined to get rid of President Assad, the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has kept Turkey’s 550-mile border with Syria open, giving the jihadists, including Isis, a safe haven over the last three years. The Turks are now saying Isis is no longer welcome, but Ankara has not moved seriously to close the border by deploying troops in large numbers.

 

A complete volte face by the US, Britain and their allies in their relations with the Assad government is unlikely because it would mean admitting that past support for the Sunni rebellion had contributed to the growth of the caliphate.

 

Mr Freeman says that he doubted that “the liberal interventionists and neoconservatives who had pursued regime change in Syria were capable of reversing course. To do so would require them to admit that they bore considerable responsibility for legitimising pointless violence that has resulted in the deaths of 190,000 Syrians.”

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/west-poised-to-join-forces-with-assad-in-face-of-islamic-state-9686666.html

[Spy Bee]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/oil-erbil

 

To the defense of Erbil: this was the main cause that drew President Obama back to combat in Iraq last week, two and a half years after he fulfilled a campaign pledge and pulled the last troops out.

After Mazar-i-Sharif, Nasiriyah, Kandahar, Mosul, Benghazi, and a score of other sites of American military intervention—cities whose names would have stumped most American “Jeopardy!” contestants before 2001—we come now to Erbil. One can forgive the isolationist: Where?

 

 

Erbil has an ancient history, but, in political-economic terms, the city is best understood these days as a Kurdish sort of Deadwood, as depicted in David Milch’s HBO series about a gold-rush town whose antihero, Al Swearengen, conjures up a local government to create a veneer of legitimacy for statehood, all to advance his rackets. Erbil is an oil-rush town where the local powers that be similarly manipulate their ambiguous sovereignty for financial gain—their own, and that of any pioneer wild and wily enough to invest money without having it stolen.

Erbil is the capital of the oil-endowed Kurdish Regional Government, in northern Iraq. There the United States built political alliances and equipped Kurdish peshmerga militias long before the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq, in 2003. Since 2003, it has been the most stable place in an unstable country. But last week, well-armed guerrillas loyal to the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, threatened Erbil’s outskirts, forcing Obama’s momentous choice. (The President also ordered air operations to deliver humanitarian aid to tens of thousands of Yazidis and other non-Muslim minorities stranded on remote Mount Sinjar. A secure Kurdistan could provide sanctuary for those survivors.)

“The Kurdish region is functional in the way we would like to see,” Obama explained during a fascinating interview with Thomas Friedman published on Friday. “It is tolerant of other sects and other religions in a way that we would like to see elsewhere. So we do think it is important to make sure that that space is protected.”

All true and convincing, as far as it goes. Kurdistan is indeed one of a handful of reliable allies of the United States in the Middle East these days. Its economy has boomed in recent years, attracting investors from all over and yielding a shiny new international airport and other glistening facilities. Of course, in comparison to, say, Jordan or the United Arab Emirates, Kurdistan has one notable deficit as a staunch American ally: it is not a state. Nor is it a contented partner in the construction of Iraqi national unity, which remains the principal project of the Obama Administration in Iraq. In that light, Obama’s explanation of his casus belli seemed a little incomplete.

Obama’s advisers explained to reporters that Erbil holds an American consulate, and that “thousands” of Americans live there. The city has to be defended, they continued, lest ISIS overrun it and threaten American lives. Fair enough, but why are thousands of Americans in Erbil these days? It is not to take in clean mountain air.

ExxonMobil and Chevron are among the many oil and gas firms large and small drilling in Kurdistan under contracts that compensate the companies for their political risk-taking with unusually favorable terms. (Chevron said last week that it is pulling some expatriates out of Kurdistan; ExxonMobil declined to comment.) With those oil giants have come the usual contractors, the oilfield service companies, the accountants, the construction firms, the trucking firms, and, at the bottom of the economic chain, diverse entrepreneurs digging for a score.

Scroll the online roster of Erbil’s Chamber of Commerce for the askew poetry of a boom town’s small businesses: Dream Kitchen, Live Dream, Pure Gold, Events Gala, Emotion, and where I, personally, might consider a last meal if trapped in an ISIS onslaught, “Famous Cheeses Teak.”

It’s not about oil. After you’ve written that on the blackboard five hundred times, watch Rachel Maddow’s documentary “Why We Did It” for a highly sophisticated yet pointed journalistic take on how the world oil economy has figured from the start as a silent partner in the Iraq fiasco.

Of course, it is President Obama’s duty to defend American lives and interests, in Erbil and elsewhere, oil or no. Rather than an evacuation of citizens, however, he has ordered a months-long aerial campaign to defend Kurdistan’s status quo, on the grounds, presumably, that it is essential to a unified Iraq capable of isolating ISIS. Yet the status quo in Kurdistan also includes oil production by international firms, as it might be candid to mention. In any event, the defense of Kurdistan that Obama has ordered should work, if the Kurdish peshmerga can be rallied and strengthened on the ground after an alarming retreat last week.

Yet there is a fault line in Obama’s logic about Erbil. The President made clear last week that he still believes that a durable government of national unity—comprising responsible leaders of Iraq’s Shiite majority, Kurds, and Sunnis who are opposed to ISIS—can be formed in Baghdad, even if it takes many more weeks beyond the three months of squabbling that have already passed since the country’s most recent parliamentary vote.

The project of a unified Baghdad government strong enough to defeat ISISwith a nationalist Army and then peel off Sunni loyalists looks increasingly like a pipe dream; it was hard to tell from the Friedman interview what odds Obama truly gives the undertaking.

Why has political unity in Baghdad proven so elusive for so long? There aremany important reasons—the disastrous American decision to disband the Iraqi Army, in 2003, and to endorse harsh de-Baathification, which created alienation among Sunnis that has never been rectified; growing sectarian hatred between Shiites and Sunnis; the infection of disaffected Sunnis with Al Qaeda’s philosophy and with cash and soft power from the Persian Gulf; interference by Iran; the awkwardness of Iraq’s post-colonial borders, and poor leadership in Baghdad, particularly under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. But another reason of the first rank is Kurdish oil greed.

During the Bush Administration, adventurers like Dallas-headquartered Hunt Oil paved the way for ExxonMobil, which cut a deal in Erbil in 2011. Bush and his advisers could not bring themselves to force American oil companies such as Hunt to divest from Kurdistan or to sanction non-American investors. They allowed the wildcatters to do as they pleased while insisting that Erbil’s politicians negotiate oil-revenue sharing and political unity with Baghdad. Erbil’s rulers never quite saw the point of a final compromise with Baghdad’s Shiite politicians—as each year passed, the Kurds got richer on their own terms, they attracted more credible and deep-pocketed oil companies as partners, and they looked more and more like they led a de-facto state. The Obama Administration has done nothing to reverse that trend.

And so, in Erbil, in the weeks to come, American pilots will defend from the air a capital whose growing independence and wealth has loosened Iraq’s seams, even while, in Baghdad, American diplomats will persist quixotically in an effort to stitch that same country together to confront ISIS.

Obama’s defense of Erbil is effectively the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal—as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example—are best not spoken of in polite or naïve company, as Al Swearengen would well understand. Life, Swearengen once pointed out, is often made up of “one vile task after another.” So is American policy in Iraq.

[Section_31]

Backing ruthless strongmen against a multitude of rebel groups and factions. 1980s America called, it wants its policies back.

[dennis tooth]

From The Independent. (and where's the US criticism of Turkey?)

 

 

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/west-poised-to-join-forces-with-assad-in-face-of-islamic-state-9686666.html

 

 

 

 

 

From The Independent. (and where's the US criticism of Turkey?)

 

 

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/west-poised-to-join-forces-with-assad-in-face-of-islamic-state-9686666.html

 

 

 

 

 

Mr Freeman says that he doubted that “the liberal interventionists and neoconservatives who had pursued regime change in Syria were capable of reversing course. To do so would require them to admit that they bore considerable responsibility for legitimising pointless violence that has resulted in the deaths of 190,000 Syrians.”

 

That about sums up the likes of numero and SD and no sense of having to bother defend their earlier support for a policy of arming ISIS.

 

Where are these experts when it gets too complicated for them? 

 

Dickhedz just dont learn, perhaps a start can be made on the word IGNORE and go from there?  Maybe ending at both your bitch asses accepting Assad didnt fire any chemical weapons and perhaps ISIS is going to be your new devil since the media told yaz to start toeing that new line.

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

I see bumbling Boris is suggesting amending the law so that any UK national who travels to Syria or Iraq without first informing the UK authorities should be presumed to be a terrorist, with it being on them to prove otherwise.

 

Bless. Tiny bit racist, that.....

[xerxes]

This makes the situation with Hamas much clearer!

 

[macdadi112]

Those that go fight for IS or any other radical group don't represent people that truly follow Islam.

[bouncebrigade]

Those that go fight for IS or any other radical group don't represent people that truly follow Islam.

 

Absolutely, because Islam is a religion of peace.  And we all know that is 100% accurate.  Don't we.

 

And the Koran is in no way ambiguous about what to do to "the infidels".