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Pan-Islamic merged mega thread
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/18/obama-too-cautious-in-bombing-isis-former-war-plan/
Obama too cautious in bombing Islamic State, former war planners say
By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Monday, January 18, 2016
Amid the 25th anniversary of the devastating Desert Storm air war, the Obama administration is bombing the Islamic State terrorist army so carefully that commanders are falling well short of enemy destruction allowed by international law.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, a key planner of both the Desert Storm air campaign and the invasion of Afghanistan, says he realizes that the hundreds of daily strikes against Iraq, which kicked off on Jan. 16, 1991, are not required today to dismantle the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS.
But he said that U.S. Central Command’s 17-month aerial war — of more than 500 days — is only averaging six U.S. strikes daily in Syria, where the Islamic State directs and exports its murder sprees. He said the command is adhering to a meticulous, zero civilian death objective, as if it were conducting a counterinsurgency against mostly tactical targets — when the enemy is actually a functioning state with many strategic targets.
“This nonsense that this is going to take years — it only takes years if you want it to take years,” Mr. Deptula, a former F-15 combat pilot, told The Washington Times. “We can put together an operation that can have such a devastating impact on the Islamic State. It would cause them to stop being able to function as they have been.”
Mr. Deptula said international law acknowledges that some civilian, or collateral, casualties will happen when legitimate military targets are hit. As a seasoned air war planner, Mr. Deptula is an authority on what an air force may and may not do under the laws of armed conflict, which derive from the 1949 Geneva Conventions and subsequent amendments.
The U.S. owns the most precise satellite- and laser-guided munitions, unleashed by the world’s most advanced warplanes. Yet Mr. Deptula has watched in frustration as the Obama team put in place rules of engagement so strict that critical operations in Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic State’s nerve center, go untouched.
PHOTOS: BOOM! U.S. military turns ISIS targets to rubble
Meanwhile, the Islamic State keeps killing people, meaning a light air campaign is actually leading to more civilians deaths, not fewer, he argues.
“The logic that is being applied with these excessive restrictions is actually creating greater civilian casualties because it has allowed the Islamic State to exist and to continue their heinous operations of killing innocent men, women and children,” Mr. Deptula said. “Drawing out of a campaign, with the anemic, absolutely ridiculous low level of effort that [has] been conducted, is creating greater civilian casualties.”
Told of complaints by Mr. Deptula and other former war planners, Air Force Col. Patrick S. Ryder, a Central Command spokesman, told The Times:
“The Desert Storm air campaign was very different from the current Operation Inherent Resolve air campaign to defeat ISIL. In Desert Storm we were fighting against a conventional army who operated in large, massed formations with a very hierarchical Iraqi military chain of command. ISIL, however, is a hybrid force — employing conventional tactics but also operating like an insurgency, hidden among the population and putting innocent civilians at great risk.
“As has been the case from the beginning of this campaign, we have continued to strike ISIL targets wherever we’ve seen them, and we continue to put intense pressure on the terrorist group in numerous locations — to include Raqqa. As indigenous anti-ISIL ground forces continue to make progress on the ground against ISIL, the intelligence and information we’ve gleaned from this has allowed us to keep up the momentum in our strikes and significantly impact ISIL’s command and control capability, logistics, infrastructure, financial resources and capacity to conduct offensive operations.”
Targeting oil trucks
The Obama administration has left the power on in Raqqa, and apparently has spared a network of operations centers that includes the Islamic State’s vaunted social media propaganda that draws in foreign fighters.
Said Mr. Deptula: “I can tell you, the headquarters buildings, the buildings in which they administer their finances, control their oil production, their electricity generations, their prison system, their police system — those are all physical locations in Raqqa that have not been struck as a result of this zero civilian/collateral damage standard.
“They have been going through excess amounts of time and analysis to determine whether or not a target can be struck to achieve zero civilian casualties. You can understand from that standard that, therefore, there are many, many, many targets that are critical to allowing the Islamic State its ability to operate,” he said.
The frustration of American fighter pilots has leaked out in a few emails. They tell of holding fire until they receive permission to attack, only to see the targets disappear, or their aircraft run low on fuel, forcing their return to base — ordnance still in place.
No target set has come to symbolize the painstaking air war more than the Islamic State’s fleet of oil trucks, from which it derives much of its cash on hand. The tankers were off limits until two months ago, and still pilots must go through several steps to ensure the drivers are given a chance to run.
“Are you kidding me?” said Mr. Deptula. “We spend 15 months before we start hitting oil trucks because we were concerned about notifying the drivers they might be the subject of an attack. That’s not a requirement in the laws of armed conflict. Why did we wait 15 months to do that? Meanwhile, you’ve pumped over $600 million dollars into the coffers of the Islamic State to allow them to conduct their crimes against humanity.”
Ex-fighter jockeys in Congress also have vented when Defense Secretary Ashton Carter testified about counter-Islamic State strategy.
At a House Armed Services Committee hearing last month, Rep. Martha McSally, a former Air Force A-10 pilot and the first U.S. female pilot to fly into combat, recalled air power seminars that called for the maximum strikes possible.
“You identify those centers of gravity or critical capabilities and vulnerabilities, and then you unleash American air power that overwhelmingly goes after them,” said Ms. McSally, Arizona Republican. “We’re just now realizing oil trucks are moving. It’s been reported from the very beginning. I’m deeply concerned about the lack of using American air power for all it brings to the fight.”
Six airstrikes a day
Last month Mr. Carter also appeared before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, and ran up against its incredulous chairman, Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican and a Navy combat pilot and POW in Vietnam.
Mr. Carter said it was only recently that the command developed the intelligence on how to identify oil trucks, but Mr. McCain apparently wasn’t buying the defense chief’s explanation.
“We knew those fuel trucks were moving back and forth,” the senator said. “We saw them through ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance], and the decision was not made in the White House to attack them or not. You can’t tell me they were moving all that stuff back and forth for over a year and we didn’t know about it. I mean, it’s just not possible given our technological capabilities.”
Mr. Carter, who has spoken this month of accelerating the war against the Islamic State by injecting more special operations troops into Iraq and Syria, explained the overall targeting philosophy.
“We have and continue to try to withhold attacks upon that part of the general infrastructure — energy, electricity, water, etc. — that is also necessary for the people of Syria,” he testified. “And we’re trying to peel off that which ISIL uses and commands and controls for its own revenue source. We’re now able to make that distinction, which is what enabled the airstrikes.”
As of Jan. 10, Operation Inherent Resolve has unleashed 3,029 strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria by U.S. aircraft and 190 more by the allies. Over more than 500 days, the pace works out to an average of a little less than six strikes a day.
In Desert Storm, the first air war to feature precision-guided weapons, the U.S. conducted about 1,200 strikes daily over 43 days against Saddam Hussein’s far-flung military, security and industrial complex. The campaign also took out power generation.
Mr. Carter told the Senate committee that commanders had ramped up air attacks on oil-related targets.
“Because of improved intelligence and understanding of ISIL’s operations, we’ve intensified the air campaign against ISIL’s war-sustaining oil enterprise, a critical pillar of ISIL’s financial infrastructure,” he testified. “In addition to destroying fixed facilities like wells and processing facilities, we’ve destroyed nearly 400 of ISIL’s oil tanker trucks, reducing a major source of its daily revenues. There’s more to come, too.”
Copyright © 2016 The Washington Times
Obama too cautious in bombing Islamic State, former war planners say
By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Monday, January 18, 2016
Amid the 25th anniversary of the devastating Desert Storm air war, the Obama administration is bombing the Islamic State terrorist army so carefully that commanders are falling well short of enemy destruction allowed by international law.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, a key planner of both the Desert Storm air campaign and the invasion of Afghanistan, says he realizes that the hundreds of daily strikes against Iraq, which kicked off on Jan. 16, 1991, are not required today to dismantle the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS.
But he said that U.S. Central Command’s 17-month aerial war — of more than 500 days — is only averaging six U.S. strikes daily in Syria, where the Islamic State directs and exports its murder sprees. He said the command is adhering to a meticulous, zero civilian death objective, as if it were conducting a counterinsurgency against mostly tactical targets — when the enemy is actually a functioning state with many strategic targets.
“This nonsense that this is going to take years — it only takes years if you want it to take years,” Mr. Deptula, a former F-15 combat pilot, told The Washington Times. “We can put together an operation that can have such a devastating impact on the Islamic State. It would cause them to stop being able to function as they have been.”
Mr. Deptula said international law acknowledges that some civilian, or collateral, casualties will happen when legitimate military targets are hit. As a seasoned air war planner, Mr. Deptula is an authority on what an air force may and may not do under the laws of armed conflict, which derive from the 1949 Geneva Conventions and subsequent amendments.
The U.S. owns the most precise satellite- and laser-guided munitions, unleashed by the world’s most advanced warplanes. Yet Mr. Deptula has watched in frustration as the Obama team put in place rules of engagement so strict that critical operations in Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic State’s nerve center, go untouched.
PHOTOS: BOOM! U.S. military turns ISIS targets to rubble
Meanwhile, the Islamic State keeps killing people, meaning a light air campaign is actually leading to more civilians deaths, not fewer, he argues.
“The logic that is being applied with these excessive restrictions is actually creating greater civilian casualties because it has allowed the Islamic State to exist and to continue their heinous operations of killing innocent men, women and children,” Mr. Deptula said. “Drawing out of a campaign, with the anemic, absolutely ridiculous low level of effort that [has] been conducted, is creating greater civilian casualties.”
Told of complaints by Mr. Deptula and other former war planners, Air Force Col. Patrick S. Ryder, a Central Command spokesman, told The Times:
“The Desert Storm air campaign was very different from the current Operation Inherent Resolve air campaign to defeat ISIL. In Desert Storm we were fighting against a conventional army who operated in large, massed formations with a very hierarchical Iraqi military chain of command. ISIL, however, is a hybrid force — employing conventional tactics but also operating like an insurgency, hidden among the population and putting innocent civilians at great risk.
“As has been the case from the beginning of this campaign, we have continued to strike ISIL targets wherever we’ve seen them, and we continue to put intense pressure on the terrorist group in numerous locations — to include Raqqa. As indigenous anti-ISIL ground forces continue to make progress on the ground against ISIL, the intelligence and information we’ve gleaned from this has allowed us to keep up the momentum in our strikes and significantly impact ISIL’s command and control capability, logistics, infrastructure, financial resources and capacity to conduct offensive operations.”
Targeting oil trucks
The Obama administration has left the power on in Raqqa, and apparently has spared a network of operations centers that includes the Islamic State’s vaunted social media propaganda that draws in foreign fighters.
Said Mr. Deptula: “I can tell you, the headquarters buildings, the buildings in which they administer their finances, control their oil production, their electricity generations, their prison system, their police system — those are all physical locations in Raqqa that have not been struck as a result of this zero civilian/collateral damage standard.
“They have been going through excess amounts of time and analysis to determine whether or not a target can be struck to achieve zero civilian casualties. You can understand from that standard that, therefore, there are many, many, many targets that are critical to allowing the Islamic State its ability to operate,” he said.
The frustration of American fighter pilots has leaked out in a few emails. They tell of holding fire until they receive permission to attack, only to see the targets disappear, or their aircraft run low on fuel, forcing their return to base — ordnance still in place.
No target set has come to symbolize the painstaking air war more than the Islamic State’s fleet of oil trucks, from which it derives much of its cash on hand. The tankers were off limits until two months ago, and still pilots must go through several steps to ensure the drivers are given a chance to run.
“Are you kidding me?” said Mr. Deptula. “We spend 15 months before we start hitting oil trucks because we were concerned about notifying the drivers they might be the subject of an attack. That’s not a requirement in the laws of armed conflict. Why did we wait 15 months to do that? Meanwhile, you’ve pumped over $600 million dollars into the coffers of the Islamic State to allow them to conduct their crimes against humanity.”
Ex-fighter jockeys in Congress also have vented when Defense Secretary Ashton Carter testified about counter-Islamic State strategy.
At a House Armed Services Committee hearing last month, Rep. Martha McSally, a former Air Force A-10 pilot and the first U.S. female pilot to fly into combat, recalled air power seminars that called for the maximum strikes possible.
“You identify those centers of gravity or critical capabilities and vulnerabilities, and then you unleash American air power that overwhelmingly goes after them,” said Ms. McSally, Arizona Republican. “We’re just now realizing oil trucks are moving. It’s been reported from the very beginning. I’m deeply concerned about the lack of using American air power for all it brings to the fight.”
Six airstrikes a day
Last month Mr. Carter also appeared before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, and ran up against its incredulous chairman, Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican and a Navy combat pilot and POW in Vietnam.
Mr. Carter said it was only recently that the command developed the intelligence on how to identify oil trucks, but Mr. McCain apparently wasn’t buying the defense chief’s explanation.
“We knew those fuel trucks were moving back and forth,” the senator said. “We saw them through ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance], and the decision was not made in the White House to attack them or not. You can’t tell me they were moving all that stuff back and forth for over a year and we didn’t know about it. I mean, it’s just not possible given our technological capabilities.”
Mr. Carter, who has spoken this month of accelerating the war against the Islamic State by injecting more special operations troops into Iraq and Syria, explained the overall targeting philosophy.
“We have and continue to try to withhold attacks upon that part of the general infrastructure — energy, electricity, water, etc. — that is also necessary for the people of Syria,” he testified. “And we’re trying to peel off that which ISIL uses and commands and controls for its own revenue source. We’re now able to make that distinction, which is what enabled the airstrikes.”
As of Jan. 10, Operation Inherent Resolve has unleashed 3,029 strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria by U.S. aircraft and 190 more by the allies. Over more than 500 days, the pace works out to an average of a little less than six strikes a day.
In Desert Storm, the first air war to feature precision-guided weapons, the U.S. conducted about 1,200 strikes daily over 43 days against Saddam Hussein’s far-flung military, security and industrial complex. The campaign also took out power generation.
Mr. Carter told the Senate committee that commanders had ramped up air attacks on oil-related targets.
“Because of improved intelligence and understanding of ISIL’s operations, we’ve intensified the air campaign against ISIL’s war-sustaining oil enterprise, a critical pillar of ISIL’s financial infrastructure,” he testified. “In addition to destroying fixed facilities like wells and processing facilities, we’ve destroyed nearly 400 of ISIL’s oil tanker trucks, reducing a major source of its daily revenues. There’s more to come, too.”
Copyright © 2016 The Washington Times
Eye In The Sky
Army.ca Legend
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Yes, what a horrible thing to do, to try to minimize to the very lowest possible number, the innocent casualties. Hopefully ZERO. You fuckin' morons.
Why would 'we' do that to women and kids who are effectively helpless to escape the battlespace and are being used as human shields? There's no debate in my mind if this is happening. There shouldn't be in anyone's. If there is, take my word for it. It is happening.
If ISIS kills people, they are responsible for that. If we drop bombs on kids and women and elderly and the sick, we are responsible for that. If we do that, knowingly kill innocent people, how the fuck are we any better than ISIS?
It's not the Gulf War, or the 2003 (re) invasion, and the US already fucked the region up enough, you think they'd learn from their goddamn mistakes.
Pretty clear and accurate to me. Maybe Deptula would get this if he was still in and had been in theatre, instead of judging from the sidelines based on shit that went down in 1991. Get over it, you'r retired. Take up lawn bowling or something.
Last point, you can drop all the shit you want, until ground forces move in and clear each block, street, and village, ISIS is going to be there. Air power is an enabler, not the end all be all. Hitler wasn't defeated over a weekend either.
I think I know their mentality, though, judging by that article. Major Harry Schmidt comes immediately to my mind...
Why would 'we' do that to women and kids who are effectively helpless to escape the battlespace and are being used as human shields? There's no debate in my mind if this is happening. There shouldn't be in anyone's. If there is, take my word for it. It is happening.
If ISIS kills people, they are responsible for that. If we drop bombs on kids and women and elderly and the sick, we are responsible for that. If we do that, knowingly kill innocent people, how the fuck are we any better than ISIS?
It's not the Gulf War, or the 2003 (re) invasion, and the US already fucked the region up enough, you think they'd learn from their goddamn mistakes.
Pretty clear and accurate to me. Maybe Deptula would get this if he was still in and had been in theatre, instead of judging from the sidelines based on shit that went down in 1991. Get over it, you'r retired. Take up lawn bowling or something.
Last point, you can drop all the shit you want, until ground forces move in and clear each block, street, and village, ISIS is going to be there. Air power is an enabler, not the end all be all. Hitler wasn't defeated over a weekend either.
I think I know their mentality, though, judging by that article. Major Harry Schmidt comes immediately to my mind...
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I am one of those who, fairly routinely, suggests that "Islam is incompatible with democracy," at least with the modern, liberal, secular sort of democracy we have.
Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from Al Jazeera is an interesting and thought provoking article which says that I'm wrong:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/01/arabs-eye-history-160119093305885.html
I agree that "millions of Arabs, Christian and Muslim, are just as passionate as citizens of Western democracies are about the universal values of human rights, justice and political freedom." But I reject the notion that I am either ignorant or racist because I believe that our sort of democracy depends upon cultural "institutions" ~ respect for the rule of law, for just one example, respect for common, community property, for another and belief in individual equality, for a third ~ that are weak to non-existent in the Arab world.
Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from Al Jazeera is an interesting and thought provoking article which says that I'm wrong:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/01/arabs-eye-history-160119093305885.html
Arabs in the eye of history
Five years that transformed the Middle East: What went right, how it's gone wrong and why it got so ugly
19 Jan 2016
Marwan Bishara, senior political analyst at Al Jazeera
When the Arab Spring swept through the Middle East five years ago, progress seemed inevitable and the contagion unstoppable. But then everything started to regress and now looks destined to go from bad to worse unless we identify why and how something so divine turned so ugly so fast.
Unfortunately, the most peddled answers one hears nowadays are also the most flawed.
In the Middle East, the conspiracy theorists blame the West's intervention and manipulation of a misguided Arab youth who bought into its subversive ideas. And in the West, smug, told-you-so cynics repeat the same derisive cliches: the Arabs are hopeless; Islam is incompatible with democracy.
Some see the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL) as proof of their scepticism of the democratic promise of the Arab Spring, and advocate support for Arab autocracy, proclaiming its security apparatuses the essential bulwark against chaos.
But that is a misreading of history.
What went wrong?
The Arab Spring was an authentic and potent response to United States neoconservative attempts to spread democracy on the back of US tanks. It showed the world that millions of Arabs, Christian and Muslim, are just as passionate as citizens of Western democracies are about the universal values of human rights, justice and political freedom. To claim otherwise is either ignorant, or racist.
If the young leaders of the Arab rebellion are at fault, it's not because they dared to act, but rather because they didn't act vigorously enough. For example, they failed to turn their slogans into political programmes and form political parties to rally the support of the wider public around their democratic vision.
Predictably, given the absence of a civil society space for opposition movements, when the grip of autocracy was breached, older and better-organised Islamist groups rushed to fill the void. Those groups failed to heed the sentiment expressed in the streets and squares of the Arab world.
Instead of embracing pluralism and strengthening the democratic process, the Islamists were seen as seeking to monopolise power, albeit through the ballot box.
But the fallout from the Islamist-secular divide could have been contained peacefully, as in Tunisia, if only the ancien regime had accepted the principle of peaceful transition towards a more just society and representative democracy. It didn't. As expected.
How it got so ugly
The old political, business and military elites - the so-called "deep state" - worked to subvert the democratic process and resorted to extreme violence in the cases of Syria, Libya, Yemen and Egypt, in the belief that they could bludgeon their way back to stability.
When that didn't work, they redefined their oppression, as a much-needed anti-terror campaign.
And ISIL was more than happy to provide the alibi for dictators to continue to repress their people. If ISIL didn't exist, it would have been necessary to invent it. But was that really the case?
Meanwhile, the region continues to unravel at terrible cost of life and property because defenders of the status quo have failed to grasp the historic transformation their repression has helped to trigger.
What began as peaceful calls for freedom, justice and jobs became revolutionary challenges that exposed the rottenness of the post-colonial regional order of Arab states.
The failure of the Arab Spring to transform those states peacefully has quickened the erosion of the entire system of the post-colonial nation state. Not necessarily a bad thing if it led to region-wide Arab unity, but in reality, it is creating new rifts within the colonial partitions.
By eschewing a relatively painless path towards political change, the security states put the region on a course towards a more painful transition. Chaos and insecurity have pushed people to seek refuge in tribal, ethnic and other primordial affiliations that undermine state legitimacy and threaten to reshape the entire region. It's a process that started in Iraq after the US invasion of the country in 2003.
Powers beyond the pale
The region is now in the throes of what Condoleezza Rice, George Bush's secretary of state, memorably (if mistakenly at the time) called "the birth pangs of a new Middle East".
And there is a lot of blame to go around for the region's descent into a series of interlocking ethnic and sectarian proxy wars. Especially those players with high stakes and few scruples, such as those ruling in Moscow and Tehran.
But unlike Western powers, Russia and Iran never claimed to support or stand for the values and aspiration of the Arab Spring. Indeed, they have been consistently dead set against them.
However, US President Barack Obama, who has been marked by his predecessor's military blunders and preoccupied by negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme, has insisted that no good can come of intervening in distant civil wars. And while he may be right, there is much the West could have done to stop the deterioration and reduce the pain.
For example, the US could have acted early and decisively against ISIL before it exploited the chaos and entrenched itself in vast areas of Iraq and Syria, by providing sufficient support to the secular or so-called moderate opposition.
He should have at least spoken forcefully in defence of the oppressed Egyptian youth, and helped to impose a no-fly zone to protect the Syrian people from the daily barrel bombings.
As the US and others held back, the situation deteriorated dangerously, the death toll rose and the prospects for a decent outcome dimmed.
Obama's hesitation on Syria was underscored by the lesson he said he had learned from the Libya debacle - that toppling a dictator without extensive, patient involvement in managing the aftermath was a recipe for an even more dangerous civil war.
After five years of turmoil and bloodshed and 50 years of dictatorships, one might not expect the West to act decisively in the spirit of the Arab Spring, but at least to refrain from selling expensive military hardware, as the US and France have done to the likes of the bankrupt Egyptian regime.
Silver lining
But the US and Russia are not paying attention.
Neither Egyptian General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, nor any of the regional dictators such as Syria's Assad are able to restore stability or security, let alone bring prosperity to their peoples.
They have violently suppressed opposition with total impunity, but have failed to tame the spirit of change.
When Assad and Sisi held elections, the turnout figures show that Syrians and Egyptians voted with their feet. Their fall is only a matter of time, but the substitute or the alternative, it seems, will be transitional at best.
The Arab world is going through an historic transformation that is certain to take more time and many lives, alas. But judging from other similar experiences in other areas and eras, history is not on the side of violent tyrannies of the Arab region.
Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
I agree that "millions of Arabs, Christian and Muslim, are just as passionate as citizens of Western democracies are about the universal values of human rights, justice and political freedom." But I reject the notion that I am either ignorant or racist because I believe that our sort of democracy depends upon cultural "institutions" ~ respect for the rule of law, for just one example, respect for common, community property, for another and belief in individual equality, for a third ~ that are weak to non-existent in the Arab world.
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Damned if you do, damned if you don't...
The author is a little thin on why the Muslim Brotherhood didn't, or wasn't able to replace the dictatorial power vacuum enough to keep ISIL and the like from gaining a foothold to develop...
G2G
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J
jollyjacktar
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They should have caned the crap out of them before they were deported.
McG
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Saudi Arabia says it is ready to send ground forces into Syria if others agree to the same ... I believe the desired "others" would be western armies. Meanwhile, Russia says that Turkey is visibly preparing an invasion.
http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/saudi-arabia-ready-to-send-ground-troops-to-syria-official-1.2765065
http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/saudi-arabia-ready-to-send-ground-troops-to-syria-official-1.2765065
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MCG said:
Great! If their performance in Yemen is anything to go by, their Army should make it a couple of kilometres in to Syria before they get curb stomped and run back to Riyadh, tails firmly between their legs.
Oldgateboatdriver
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The Saudis have been funding any group that endorses and seeks to impose the Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam, especially those who seek to impose it on their arch enemy Shia Islam.
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Oldgateboatdriver said:
I think that in fairness to the actual Saudi government, we need to note that what the government, per se, funds, officially, is different from what is funded by any of the 6,000+ Saudi princes and princelings (and princesses, too) from their
I have no brief for the House of Saud, in my opinion the world will be a better place when they're all in a mass grave, but there is some sort of "policy" at the very top which is, very often, scuppered by folks nearer to the bottom of the Royal heap.
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While that's technically correct, this week, I listened to a BBC interview with an SA Interior Ministry official (with a general's rank) get asked about this. He he said something to the effect of "there are laws in our country against financing terrorism." If that's the case, giddyup, Saudi authorities! ;DE.R. Campbell said:
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milnews.ca said:
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter
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I guess this is where authorities show "discretion", right?Humphrey Bogart said:
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