Article

2019-11-25 Iraq

9 More Shot Dead as Protesters in Iraq Now Calling for Revolution

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Posted by Besoeker 2019-11-25 00:20|| || Front Page|| [11135 views ] Top
File under: Govt of Iraq

#1 I had such hopes for Iraq after Saddam got his ass kicked. OK, it wasn't hope hope, but they deserved a chance to get beyond the tribal thing and become a modern country. Pity they couldn't pull it off.

Posted by SteveS 2019-11-25 00:54|| 2019-11-25 00:54|| Front Page Top

#2 ^ Shoulda left the post-Saddam Ba'athists in power to keep the lights on, air conditioning running, garbage picked up and [human] garbage disposed of.

Probably also shoulda partitioned the country, with a forward US Airbase in an independent Kurdistan to keep a lid on Iranian mischief.

Posted by Lex 2019-11-25 02:10|| 2019-11-25 02:10|| Front Page Top

#3 hindsight, 20/20 etc

Posted by Lex 2019-11-25 02:10|| 2019-11-25 02:10|| Front Page Top

#4 'Revolution' in MidEast means only 3 things:

More Islam, Less Islam or Islam: Which Flavor?

Posted by Bob Grorong1136 2019-11-25 16:06|| 2019-11-25 16:06|| Front Page Top

#5 Shoulda left the post-Saddam Ba'athists in power to keep the lights on, air conditioning running, garbage picked up and [human] garbage disposed of.

When PM of Israel & king of Saudi give you the same advice, you should listen.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2019-11-25 16:31|| 2019-11-25 16:31|| Front Page Top

#6 Just a reminder that it was the neo-cons who decided to disband the Baath party.

These were the same people who came up with the idea for the invasion in the first place. They aren't too bright. Their entire idea was "overthrow Saddam" with absolutely no plan for what they were going to do afterwards. That it turned out poorly is no surprise.

Posted by Herb McCoy 2019-11-25 23:24|| 2019-11-25 23:24|| Front Page Top

#7 I was one of those neo-cons. The fact is that under Saddam Hussein, all sorts of terrorists — including Al Qaeda cadres among the Moslem jihadis and the Catholic Irish Republican Army among others — were trained at the Salman Pak facility by Iraqi Special Forces in all sorts of terror techniques, from how to hijack an airplane (using the passenger jet parked on the grounds) to advanced bomb making and bio-weapons manufacture. We have 66 articles touching on Salman Pak in the Rantburg archive — take a look.

But the fact is, bad things got in Iraq and therefore Syria, at least they don’t have the training and research of a very rich and vicious nation state training and guiding them to ever higher levels of competence, In fact, as I recall something like 50,000 ISIS fighters have been killed since we reconquered their little caliphate, among whom are no doubt a great many who had that professional training. What the world will be dealing with going forward is mostly the second and third tiers of ability, which may explain why there have been fewer and smaller attacks recently.

Posted by trailing wife 2019-11-25 23:48|| 2019-11-25 23:48|| Front Page Top

23:48 trailing wife
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