From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:
My belief is, we will, in fact be greeted as liberators.
– Dick Cheney on NBC’s Meet the Press, March 16, 2003
The fighters there insist there have been no strikes by the Americans at all. “We’d be better off without them,” said 1st Lt. Murtada Fadl, who is serving with the Iraqi elite forces in Baiji. He said that the only air support had come from the Iraqi air force and that he wishes the government would ask the Russians to replace the Americans.
“The image of the U.S. was damaged in the region, so they created Daesh in order to fight them and restore their image,” said Mohammed Abdul Khaleq, a journalist for a local TV station who was drinking coffee in a cafe favored by writers, most of whom said they agreed.
– From the Washington Post article: Iraqis Think the U.S. is in Cahoots With the Islamic State, and it is Hurting the War
The Iraq War will go down as the single greatest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. It is simply the unmitigated disaster that keeps on giving.
To recap, the people who the U.S. government supposedly “liberated,” now hate Americans so much that most of them are convinced the U.S. is in cahoots with ISIS. Not that you could blame them for coming to this conclusion, considering the indisputable role the U.S. government played in the creation of ISIS.
From the post: Additional Details Emerge on How U.S. Government Policy Created, Armed, Supported and Funded ISIS
Telling Hasan that he had read the document himself, Flynn said that it was among a range of intelligence being circulated throughout the US intelligence community that had led him to attempt to dissuade the White House from supporting these groups, albeit without success.
Despite this, Flynn’s account shows that the US commitment to supporting the Syrian insurgency against Bashir al-Assad led the US to deliberately support the very al-Qaeda affiliated forces it had previously fought in Iraq.
The US anti-Assad strategy in Syria, in other words, bolstered the very al-Qaeda factions the US had fought in Iraq, by using the Gulf states and Turkey to finance the same groups in Syria. As a direct consequence, the secular and moderate elements of the Free Syrian Army were increasingly supplanted by virulent Islamist extremists backed by US allies.It should be noted that precisely at this time, the West, the Gulf states and Turkey, according to the DIA’s internal intelligence reports, were supporting AQI and other Islamist factions in Syria to “isolate” the Assad regime. By Flynn’s account, despite his warnings to the White House that an ISIS attack on Iraq was imminent, and could lead to the destabilization of the region, senior Obama officials deliberately continued the covert support to these factions.
To continue reading: Epic Foreign Policy Fail
