The first thing you hear is the music. It lilts and sways. Then you see the Islamist militants. They’re knocking at a policeman’s door. It’s the middle of the night, but the cop soon answers. He’s blindfolded and cuffed. They take him to the bedroom. And then, reports say, they decapitate him with a knife.
Another video captures militants with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) herding hundreds of boys and Iraqi soldiers down a highway to an unknown fate. “Repent,” ISIS told inhabitants of its newly conquered territory on Thursday. “But anyone who insists upon apostasy faces death.”
Death was everywhere in the sacked the city of Mosul, a strategically vital oil hub and Iraq’s largest northern city. One reporter said an Iraqi woman in Mosul claimed to have seen a “row of decapitated soldiers and policemen” on the street. Other reports spoke of “mass beheadings,” though The Washington Post was not able to confirm the tales.
But the United Nations Human Rights chief, Navi Pillay, said the summary executions “may run into the hundreds” and that she was “extremely alarmed.”
Well, we can't confirm this story that will be used to justify military action in Iraq. But we're printing it anyway, because military action in Iraq. Of course the man leading that charge is Johnny Volcano.
Sen. John McCain said Thursday that President Barack Obama’s entire national security team should resign over the resurgence of Islamic militants in Iraq.
“Everybody in his national security team, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ought to be replaced,” the Arizona Republican told reporters ahead of a classified Senate Armed Services Committee briefing on the deteriorating situation in Iraq. “It’s a colossal failure of American security policy.”
Because the Iraq War itself was somehow not a colossal failure of American policy. Jesus. We'd be at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and South Sudan and Ukraine right now if McCain were president. Obama has kept us out of another bloody mess.
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I'll probably get vilified for saying this, but the administration has set themselves up to be criticized and blamed for "losing Iraq" because they did not effectively frame the situation from the beginning. They should have been loudly vocal from the start about what a colossal CF this was and what a chaotic, unstable nightmare Bush and Co created in the entire region with their illegal and immoral war. Trials would have been politically impossible, but investigations and public reports of the lies and atrocities that led to this current situation and an open discussion of the disaster it has created could have pointed the public in the direction of correctly understanding what a horrible and immoral mistake this invasion was. We and much of the rest of the world will reap the "rewards" of Cheney's war for many years and Obama will be credited with having lost it after Bush had it in the bag with that ridiculous "surge" that did nothing. It was the completion of the first step of ethnic cleansing that led to the initial appearance of a lessening of tensions, but this latest fighting and the eventual fall of Iraq into even worse hands than Saddam's was accurately predicted by many and the public should have been made aware of the inevitability of it.
ReplyDeleteThis is the problem with today's Democratic Party - they don't clearly explain how terrible the Republican Party's policies are. Democrats worry that holding Republicans responsible for their crimes will make bi-partisan cooperation difficult. Today's Republican Party knows that any hint of acting in a bipartisan manner will see them hounded out of office by Fox "News" rants alienating the base voters in their carefully-gerrymandered districts.
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