In The News
So we captured the mastermind behind the attack on the Benghazi consulate and are bringing him back for to the US for trial. US diplomatic sites are US territory, which is why this is legal and appropriate.
The view on the Right, according to ‘talk radio’, is that this was timed to assist Hillary Clinton, and isn’t really about punishing the man responsible for the death of four US diplomatic personnel.
In the Land Down Under the ABC has a useful series of maps that show the ethnic distribution in the country, and the areas of control for the three major groups.
The armchair generals among us can see some obvious moves for pushing ISIS back, but they would require some cooperation and coordination between the Kurds and Shiia, which not a given at this point.
The Iraq War ‘cheerleaders’ may not want to call this a sectarian war, but some of the Sunni governments in the area see it that way. The former Qatari ambassador to the US is on the record as saying that any use of force by the US against ISIS would be considered an attack on Sunni Islam.
Meanwhile Congresscritters are twisting themselves into pretzels over the reality that helping the Maliki government combat ISIS puts the US on the same side as Iran. They want Zero to do something about ISIS, but don’t want to be on the same side as Iran.
The Sunni governments who are our ‘friends’ in the Middle East seem to have been funneling money and arms to ISIS to fight Assad, and are now faced with having to deal with the monster they have created.
There is no way of independently verifying what he says, but McClatchy has a story on how the attack on Mosul unfolded from one of the Iraqi soldiers who fled the city.
4 comments
Looks like you were right about the officers deserting first.
This is the sort of situation where Stalin stationed political officers with a pistol held to each military officer’s head in order to ensure the loyalty of the military officers. It makes me wonder whether Maliki wanted those officers to desert, both because he appointed them in the first place, and because he took no measures to ensure their competence or loyalty. If they had been appointed as a political favor to factions whose votes he needed at a given time but that he didn’t really trust, well. Good riddance to bad rubbish as far as he’s concerned.
I would point out that any military whose officers desert is a military in name only, but I think that’s being redundant.
Platoons or squads might panic, but what happened in Mosul required a major command and control failure which is usually caused by the loss of all of the senior officers, either by a devastating attack on a headquarters or desertion. Following an attack junior officers will see promotion opportunities, but following a desertion they will expect to be tarred with the same brush as the senior officers, so they quit too.
Maliki is a politician and see everything as political. It would never occur to him that certain jobs require competence and not just connections.
Maliki is also a former militia leader though and one reason why Iraqis elected his party into power is because his militia was the largest and most effective of the Shiite militias. While militia and military have different leadership requirements because militia fight because they’re loyal to you and believe what you stand for while (effective) militaries fight because they’re loyal to their country and believe in their country, militia does require loyal underlings. Indeed, loyalty is the primary attribute a militia leader looks for when choosing underlings. Clearly these military “officers” weren’t loyal — they deserted!
Makes you wonder if Maliki deliberately chose these “officers” so that if he ever had to pull back together his own militia (who “disbanded” but the people aren’t dead and their weapons are still buried in their gardens) the military would be no threat to his own militia…
As a number of people have said that Maliki got rid of generals who were considered effective, and retained those who were considered incompetent, your concept seems to fit the available evidence. He doesn’t want another nexus of power to exist in Iraq, and an effective military would be a center of power.
It would seem that the Shiia militias are already going the reprisal route where they are operating, but Wolfowitz doesn’t think this is a sectarian war.