Iraq is collapsing at lightening speed
In a nutshell: Iraq is collapsing too fast for anyone to comprehend. In a few days much of the heartland of this failed nation-state has fallen under the direct control of the Islamic State In Iraq and the Levant. ISIL as you will hear it referred constantly over the next days and months is an Al Qaeda splinter group.
(Rueters)Since Tuesday, black clad ISIL fighters have seized Iraq's second biggest city Mosul and Tikrit, home town of former dictator Saddam Hussein, as well as other towns and cities north of Baghdad. They continued their lightning advance on Thursday, moving into towns just an hour's drive from the capital.
The army of the Shi'ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government in Baghdad has essentially fled in the face of the onslaught, abandoning buildings and weapons to the fighters who aim to create a strict Sunni Caliphate on both sides of the Iraq-Syria frontier.
Fallujah, Mosul, Samarra, Tikrit have all fallen within the past week and ISIL is now heading to Baghdad. Iraqi troops protecting the thuggish Shiite regime of Nouri Al-Maliki upon seeing the Jihad at their city gates are tearing off their uniforms, tossing their guns on the ground and running into the desert. It is the 7th century in mesopotamia. What ISIL has not occupied in the northern oil fields the Kurdish Peshmerga has.
This is the army that we trained over a dozen years. The media is already thumping the line "at the cost of $15 Billion". They don't mention the effect a trillion dollars spent on contractors shooting up traffic jams and 19 year olds under the command of 22 year olds conducting ritualistic night raids has had on this population.
Malicki is now calling, loudly for US airstrikes. He might find more welcoming ears in Tehran as he has spent the past six years pushing Americans out while embracing the Shiite superpower to the east. Iran is said to be considering how it can help which could exponentially widen this conflict into an Islamic World War. Iraq had in fact become a Shiite client state of Iran since the US occupation ended.
The hatred between the Sunni and Shiite, whom President GW Bush didn't even realize were distinct sects before invading this country, is profound, stewing for a millennium. It doesn't trump their common hatred of Americans or even more so Jews, but there aren't any Americans or Jews occupying Iraq anymore, so, in the chaos we have bequeathed them, they are venting on themselves.
Thousands of dead Amercans stacked on hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis have built a hatred of Americans and democracy. A dozen years ago the USA was willingly duped into a war of convenience. Iraq would become a defacto 51st state where you could ski on the Euphrates and drive your F-250 from Basrah to Mosul on $1.25 gas. They would love us and the undeniable seed of democracy would spread from their though out the heathen middle east. Millions of souls ripe for Christianity and the Republican Party.
Aint happening people. Not today. Not never.