Courtesy of Mish.
Total Failure
Senator McCain and others want to send more weapons to Iraq, as we bomb US weapons already there (but now in hands of Isis).
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton blames Obama for not sending weapons to Syrian moderates, even though we did train Syrian rebels in Jordan.
Intervention, past and present, has been a total failure.
US Bombs Its Own Weapons
Let’s tie the above thoughts together starting with The US Bombing Its Own Guns Perfectly Sums Up America’s Total failure in Iraq.
In the decade since the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion, the US has spent a fortune training and arming the Iraqi army in the hopes of readying it to secure the country once America left. That meant arming the Iraqi army with high-tech and extremely expensive American-made guns, tanks, jeeps, artillery, and more.
But the Iraqi army has been largely a failure. When ISIS invaded northern Iraq from Syria in June, the Iraqi forces deserted or retreated en masse. Many of them abandoned their American equipment. ISIS scooped it up themselves and are now using it to rampage across Iraq, seizing whole cities, terrorizing minorities, and finally pushing into even once-secure Kurdish territory. All with shiny American military equipment.
So the US air strikes against ISIS are in part to destroy US military equipment, such as the artillery ISIS has been using against Kurdish forces. The absurdity runs deep: America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment halfway around the world.
The American weapons the US gave the Iraqi army totally failed at making Iraq secure and have become tools of terror used by an offshoot of al-Qaeda to terrorize the Iraqis that the US supposedly liberated a decade ago. And so now the US has to use American weaponry to destroy the American weaponry it gave Iraqis to make Iraqis safer, in order to make Iraqis safer.
It keeps going: the US is intervening on behalf of Iraqi Kurds, our ally, because their military has old Russian-made weapons, whereas ISIS, which is America’s enemy, has higher-quality American weapons. “[Kurdish forces] are literally outgunned by an ISIS that is fighting with hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army who abandoned it,” Ali Khedery, a former American official in Iraq, told the New York Times.
Hillary Blames Obama
Hillary Clinton is in a desperate attempt to distance herself from president Obama in 2016 presidential bid. Her strategy has been to side with McCain regarding Obama’s failure to send more weapons to “moderates” in Syria attempting to overthrow Syrian president Bashar Hafez al-Assad….
