The fall of Baghdad?

I have watched with disgust how ISIS has metastasized into a organization that attracts young people into its web, and want to die for its cause. All while our government twiddled its thumbs.

I just read about a seventeen year old English boy who (apparently) willingly blew himself up in Iraq to further their cause. I don’t understand how a middle class kid from northern England could be anxious to kill himself. But the message is clear. ISIS has become a formidable force and has fanatical followers.

And all the while, President Obama dithers about what to do. He announced that he doesn’t have a strategy other than pinprick, nuisance air strikes against them and their brethren organizations. Why is this?

Well, President Obama is intelligent but naive. ISIS is depending on him dithering until the end of his presidency and blocking any meaningful methods to eliminate ISIS. He doesn’t want to go down in history as a war monger like his predecessor.

The president has trapped himself by declaring “no boots on the ground” even though thousands of advisers  a.k.a. “boots on the ground” are in Iraq and probably some in Syria. They are allegedly training Iraqi forces and helping the “moderate” Syrian resistance defeat the Syrian government brutal regime. He has spoken many times about what he will not do. And that is send in soldiers. I believe that he eventually will, but it will probably be too late and he’ll be demonized just like President Georgie W. Bush, our pariah (thankfully) former president.

The problem is that we haven’t learned to let sleeping dogs lie. Our stupid foreign policy continually causes massive turmoil, this time in the Middle East. Then we are amazed at the hatred it engenders for America. Our foreign policy is foul. We cannot expect to kill, or be responsible for the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people and expect no blow-back. We don’t, which points to just how stupid our politicians are.

As I wrote years ago during my congressional campaign, the only way to fix this mess is to change sides and work with the Syrian brutal regime government to defeat ISIS and its cohorts. We can then help the Iraqi government retake ISIS held territory. It would have been easy then. Not now, as the cancer has spread.

I recently read that ISIS mustered 2,000 fighters to take a Syrian army base a few weeks ago. Two thousand! I wonder how long it will be before they focus on Baghdad so when it falls, so goes Iraq and Syria?

Not long. Our president is weak, and they are counting on that. He is having too much fun giving speeches, his favorite pastime, to do what’s right. He doesn’t want to change his mind as he’ll be embarrassed and the Democratic Party could lose some votes.

ISIS will use his weakness to encircle Baghdad; send in the suicide bombers and then attack. Baghdad will fall and our “advisers” will leave very, very fast. It will be Saigon all over again.

Even the Russians are hedging their bets. They have a Mediterranean naval in Tartus, Syria so have good reasons to keep the Syrian government in power. But they have signed a deal with nearby Cyprus to use naval facilities there… if needed. It’s called hedging your bets.

Do you think that the Iraqi army will resist? An example was set before and will be again. They are mostly interested in getting a paycheck, not fighting for their country.

When the going gets tough, the Iraqi soldiers will run for it. They will abandon the weapons we gave them. ISIS will be happy to add them to their arsenal. They will be the best weapons American taxpayers money can buy. ISIS won’t even say thank you.

The Republicans will point fingers at the Democrats and the Democrats will do the opposite… in public. Behind the scenes, they’ll be having drinks together in Washington and talk about reelection strategies in their gerrymandered districts; the only thing that they are really interested in. Two sides of the same coin.

We are in for trouble, and because of the weakness of our alleged leaders it’s going to get worse. When the ship sinks, it doesn’t sink at the Republican Party end, nor the Democratic Party end. It sinks. Our politicians will be the first off the ship and into the lifeboats. The public are chained to the oars and will go down with the ship.

Good luck with the crash of 2018~19. You’ll need it.