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Posted on Sep 15, 2015 in Donald Trump, Foreign Policy Issues, Iraq | 0 comments

An ignorant Trump with his own General MacArthur would spell disaster in the Middle East.

  Donald Trump’s argument that it doesn’t matter whether he knows even the most rudimentary information about the Mideast because once elected President he’d spend twenty-four hours brushing up and that, he told us was enough to make him the best foreign policy president ever is, on the one hand, amusing in its own way because it shows him to be an egotistical buffoon. On the other hand, it was frightening, when he elaborated on his foreign policy strategy by saying that he’ll simply go and find a Douglas MacArthur to fix the problem of ISIS. This awful suggestion demands a closer examination. It it is worth noting that even hawkish conservatives, who might otherwise welcome a MacArthur or a Patton or a Westmoreland running our Mideast involvement, recognize essential nature of Donald Trump and his bombastic “Trumpism’s.” Writing for the very conservative National Review last week, Jonah Goldberg said of Trump: “He’s a mouth at the wrong end of an alimentary canal spewing crap with no sense of responsibility.” Now in case any of you don’t recognize Patton, Westmoreland, and MacArthur, they were former war...

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Posted on Jul 28, 2015 in Anbar, Elections-U.S., Foreign Policy Issues, Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Israel, Kobani, Kurdistan, Middle East, Turkey, Uncategorized | 0 comments

Turkey finally joins fight against ISIS. Kurdish PKK attack Turkey. Iraqi Conundrum made more complicated.

What a merry go-around. The Kurdish Peshmerga have proven to be the best Iraqi fighters against ISIS. The Kurds have been asking for weapons from us directly, i.e., not handed out piecemeal from the weak Shia dominated Iraqi government. Something we should do, right? But wait. The Turks don’t want us to do that. We have been trying to get Turkey, the biggest power in the immediate region and a member of N.A.T.O., to let us use a base in Turkey for our air strikes against ISIS. We have also been after Turkey to help directly in the fight against ISIS. This past week they finally entered the fray, in a limited way, after attacks by ISIS on a Turkish city that lies on their border with Syria. They also finally agreed to allow us to use the air base, in exchange for us trying to create a safe zone in Northern Syria. So why don’t they want us to provide heavy military supplies directly to the Kurds to...

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Posted on Apr 21, 2015 in Foreign Policy Issues, Israel, Middle East, President Obama | 1 comment

Is the fall of Ramadi as unimportant as the U.S. claims? Facing ISIS-the Iraqi conundrum.

    As I write this post, Ramadi, the largest city and capital of al Anbar Governate, is about to fall to ISIS. Part of the Sunni Triangle, Ramadi is strategically located on the Euphrates River, only 70 miles from Baghdad. And yet Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey said its loss was “not symbolic in any way.” Perhaps his politically ignorant comment was made to downplay probable fall-out from if Ramadi is lost. If Dempsey truly believes that this city, which is the largest Dulaimi tribal populated one in the Triangle, isn’t symbolically important in the fight against ISIS, then it is no surprise that ISIS has found such fertile ground in the Sunni dominated parts of Iraq. Let’s hope that General Dempsey will be overruled. In order to grasp the symbolic, if not strategic, role that Ramadi and the rest of the Sunni Triangle plays in the fight against ISIS, it may be worthwhile to recollect the conundrum that we face in Iraq. Our Allies...

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Posted on Mar 30, 2015 in Foreign Policy Issues, Middle East | 0 comments

Iraq and Yemen: Watch how we label the enemy or we risk making the same mistakes in that we did in Vietnam.

Yemen, Iraq, and more infamously the Vietnam War all have seen U.S. foreign policy stumble badly because of faulty logic in the facile application of highly abstract labels to describe the participants. For example, in Vietnam, at the height of the Cold War, Ho Chi Minh and his followers were given the most highly charged label of that time period: “communists.” It implied a threatening enemy of the United States, a tool of the Chinese Communists, and, to use an even more confusingly abstract term, the “free world.” All of the “free world” knew (or more precisely thought they knew), about the inevitable militant class conflict that Communist theoreticians Karl Marx and Vladimir Illyich Lenin predicted. War with the communists therefore was inevitable. From the right-wing came the book by Cleon Skouson, “The Naked Communist,” which posited that communists, like Aldous Huxley’s “Big-Brother” were in the process of creating “Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.” The communists were aided, he...

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