Fresh off his visit to Iraq, US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford declared that Iraq doesn’t want Russian help in fighting ISIS, and that the US is their “main ally” and all they need in the ongoing war, while accusing Russia of making the Syrian war “worse” by their recent participation.
Gen. Dunford claimed to have been told this in meetings with Iraqi PM Hayder Abadi, even though Abadi has publicly insisted, repeatedly, that he “would welcome” Russian airstrikes against ISIS and indeed would welcome help from any country willing in the battle.
Dunford’s comments mostly didn’t read like this was a conclusive position of the Iraqi government at any rate, but more wishful thinking and politicking by the Pentagon, centering on how great an ally the US is to Iraq and how Iraq would be risking that if they dared accept help from Russia.
So far, Abadi hasn’t made any new comments one way or another, though the nation has already accepted some help from Russia on the intelligence-sharing end of things, and the US dramatically scaled back their own such program with Iraq to “punish” them, suggesting Iraq may be leaning more heavily toward Russia.
Some Turk says it's ok for Assad to stay a bit longer, some US dummy says what Iraq wants or doesn't want. There seems to be a pattern here. Can't wait for Iraq to formally request help from Russia, to make Dumbford look really dumb. Not that he would care, he gets off on it.
They already have. I heard it on BBC this morning.
After fourteen years and trillions of dollars, Iraq is SNAFU. If the Russian with Iraqi and Iranian support manage to sort it out for a few billion in a couple of years then the US military-industrial complex and government are going to find it very hard to explain to the American public just why they wasted all that treasure.
It would be very helpful if Putin got himself even more bogged down in an unwinnable war than he already is in Syria and the general's remarks may be an attempt to provoke Putin. A typical European populist, little Vlad has no policies. He just struts up and down thumbing his nose at people and things he doesn't like. Thus, as, indeed, we've seen with Syria, the best way of getting Putin to do something is for the US to pretend to try to stop him. Putin has been fool enough to fall into traps like this before.
General DUMBford
Yup. What the Iraqis really need is more help like that which was provided by the father/son tag team from Bushco