... fought in the region, and alliance against their mutual enemy: Maliki’s anti-Sunni government. Using Anbar as a base within Iraq, ISIS was able to advance and take large amounts of Iraqi territory, much of which it still holds today. Thus, it was Maliki’s absolute refusal to compromise with and accommodate Iraqis Sunnis and others that created the current crisis with ISIS. The sad truth is that if Maliki had treated the Sunnis and Kurds more fairly, the Iraqi government—Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds united against terrorism as they were back in 2007—would ...
... operating). It’s not like all of Catholic Europe will be sending holy warriors in a crusade to fight Orthodox Russia’s attempts to annex the ethnic Russian, Orthodox... ... now, the U.S. has a president in office now who campaigned on the fact that invading Iraq in 2003 was a colossal mistake, who, keeping this in mind, intervened only lightly... ... in 2014, when ISIS nearly marched on Baghdad after taking much of the country from Maliki’s sectarian Shiite regime. Now, for the past few years, the big magnet...
... here, and I agree that a residual force would have been better but that is 100% on Maliki not granting immunity and having already committed to his Iranian allies that... ... out in 2011. We will come to ISIS (and Obama’s mild military reengagement in Iraq) and Syria as separate issues.
Israeli/Palestinian Peace
Here, one may be... ... settlement housing units to be built on illegally occupied, disputed land in East Jerusalem (which was occupied in 1967 along with the West Bank and Gaza and which Israel...
... political front, even Maliki’s closest allies, including the Shiite Iranian regime (arguable even a bigger supporter of him than the U.S.), began to distance themselves from him and abandon him.
The Obama Administration Makes Its Move: Checkmate on Maliki
Tens of thousands of Yazidis were running out of time, though, and facing genocide, and ISIS kept making gains, even threatening Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. With intense pressure coming at Maliki from all angles, Obama announced on August 7 that U.S. forces would carry out limited air strikes in Iraq aimed at halting ISIS’s advance. Many of these initial strikes were in the north, helping ...
