According to senior administration officials, President Obama’s latest notion on intervention in Iraq is to model it after the ongoing Yemen drone war, launching “highly selective” airstrikes against ISIS forces in Iraq rather than engaging in a full-scale air war aimed at changing the situation on the ground.
Officials say the US is in the process of trying to gather “intelligence” on where militants are in Mosul and Tikrit, and that the strikes could begin in a few days, and could last for a “prolonged period.”
This was apparently selected out of a “sliding scale” of different military options for Iraq, and that the open-ended campaign of targeted airstrikes envisions slowly weakening ISIS leadership.
Bizarrely, the Yemen campaign has been anything but a success, as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)’s leadership hasn’t been seriously degraded by years of US attacks, and unlike AQAP, ISIS is seizing territory outright, and establishing its own nation.
The plan seems to concede ISIS’s existence as a de facto state, while antagonizing their leadership, which is now armed with US anti-aircraft missiles looted from Iraq.
The Yemen involvement is subject of frequent misrepresentation. We do have people on the ground. We do more than drone strikes. Covert is not unknown, just not much admitted and harder to find in the press. It kills all the same. If it failing just the same.
If we are to do Yemen in Iraq, it would very likely be our real involvment in Yemen, not just our pretense of extreme limits.
CAn anybody tell me how this fit to this alleged aim of a new map of Iraq and the middle east?–> http://disinfo.com/2013/06/world-war-iii-began-in…
Is it a targeted bombing within the command structure of Al CIAda in order to fit is to the corporations interests?
Yemen isn't going all that well, and Obama appears to have forgotten the lesson of Vietnam, which is that you cannot win a war from the air.
Hope some of those planned air strikes will also target "moderate rebels" in Syria, or maybe they will come up with some technicality.
This man is just a hot air, his words means nothing nor his theoretical ideas doing this or that. He had made a promises to Saudis and UAE tyrants regimes that: he will provide, pave the way for them to expend their religious territory against any unity among nations in the region. Ruling the world means you need to creat the third word war in cooperation with those whom are supportive of such idea, Saudis and UAE, Turkish government, the Neo fascism in Europe are ones.
Airstrikes to keep the natives in line? Pffft. Guy's a loser following another loser's failed policy.
Message to militants in the US. If you attack ISIS, don't get all surprised and freaky when terrorist attacks take place in the US.