Breaking: First batch of Russian fighter jets arrives in Iraq!

originally posted by: neversaynever
a reply to: buster2010 yes buster it is nice if america went to. Iraq screw it up royaly, made the country un rulable, poor and left is defenseless. Then f off and gloat. Washing your hand and say enjoy the mess we created sort it out by yourself as we are too efing useless to fix our sht.

We armed the and trained them our responsibility to the nation ended when they asked for the American forces to leave that nation. If you want people to die fighting ISIS go over there and sign up.

originally posted by: CALGARIAN

Those are not fighers. Those are Su-25s ground attack aircraft.

The Russian counterpart to the A10 warthog you mothballed.

a reply to: Chiftel

The A-10 hasn't been mothballed.

a reply to: neversaynever

The real truth you say?

So the US, who were well entrenched in Iraq, decided that they'd pull out, throw some cash at ISIS to go and take Iraq for them, which they already had in the first place.

Totally makes sense!!

originally posted by: buster2010
Glad to see they are getting these planes. Now there is no reason for them to be asking America to do any air strikes for them.

Exactly.

I'd like to see Russia help Syria a little more too. That way the next time Israel commits strikes against them, Syria would be able to intercept them and put a stop to that idiocy. But lets just hope that this "ISIS" doesn't get a hold of these. Lets also hope that Iraq isn't divided into three sections because that would be their death.

originally posted by: DeadSeraph

originally posted by: buster2010
Glad to see they are getting these planes. Now there is no reason for them to be asking America to do any air strikes for them.

Because 5 SU-25's can secure the airspace of an entire nation...

The first delivery was 5, but they plan to get around 12, maybe more:

Iraq was procuring more than a dozen aircraft in the first display of Iraqi combat air power since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

They're not saying exactly how many they bought. Also, they will have no enemy air threats against them, but they will have to worry about SAMs.

Here's one arriving at the al-Muthanna Iraqi military base in Baghdad. These guys don't have any identification badges, but they look Russian to me. I wonder if they will fly these planes, Korean war style?

But officials said the Russian Air Force has sent training and maintenance crews to operate the single-seat Su-25s. They did not rule out that Russian pilots would help in initial missions.

Source

originally posted by: pavil
a reply to: CALGARIAN

The Obama administration is a reactive and passive one. They are so far out of touch with the situation on the ground that I consider them to be a non player in what is happening in Iraq now. No one there believes that he will do anything to make a difference, why should they, given his track record of late.

Under Obama, America is in withdrawal globally. Other Nations notice that.........

Obama is anti-war and pro-domenstic. Wouldn't you rather see those trillions spent to enhance your quality of life?

a reply to: Gianfar

America needs to be proactive leader on the World Stage. History abhors a vacuum and we are seeing the results of that right now.

It's not like I'm a warmonger and against puppy dogs too. We have badly played things in Iraq under the Obama Administration and will now pay a price for that mismanagement.

There are plenty of places to cut budgetary dollars, foreign aid and Military spending as well as a HOST of other things, domestic even. Don't paint it so cut and dry. Letting Iraq teeter into a failed State, is NOT a good option, but it's almost past the point where we can influence things now given the way we have proceeded in Iraq.

originally posted by: pavil
a reply to: Gianfar

America needs to be proactive leader on the World Stage. History abhors a vacuum and we are seeing the results of that right now.

It's not like I'm a warmonger and against puppy dogs too. We have badly played things in Iraq under the Obama Administration and will now pay a price for that mismanagement.

There are plenty of places to cut budgetary dollars, foreign aid and Military spending as well as a HOST of other things, domestic even. Don't paint it so cut and dry. Letting Iraq teeter into a failed State, is NOT a good option, but it's almost past the point where we can influence things now given the way we have proceeded in Iraq.

I understand your points and appreciate the general spirit by which your statement is so well put.

So, when we talk about being 'proactive on the world stage', that's code for interregional, long term planning and the preemptive initiatives that have led us to this crescendo of world intrigue, failed states and a manifold increase in terrorism.

History will certainly abhor the vacuum created by the Bush anti-terror act, which established the ideological overtones necessary for the preemptive policy his group needed to accomplish their wealth project. A script which allows Washington policy makers, the Pentagon and the CIA - unfettered pretexts in waging war, military incursions and regime change based on far fetched interpretations of threats.

Let's not forget that all of the intelligence used by Pres. Bush to bolster the Weapons of Mass Destruction pretext turned out to be false. Regardless of whether one believes it was cooked or just a wild guess, it nevertheless illustrates only part of the Bush administration incompetence. In subsequent memoirs of the principal players (namely; Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powel and Rice) careful attention was paid to not reveal the decision making processes or actual reasons for the Iraq invasion, further avoiding any discussion regarding the post war processes. All we know is that Bush (the Decider) determined that the US would engage in long term management and rebuilding, which offered (among other things) a boost to American engineering corporations and oil companies in which the Bush family and the other mentioned principals were already well vested. He called Paul Bremer to head the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for the post-invasion phase, and this is where the second phase of incompetence occurred.

So many horribly disenfranchising decisions were made in the oversight of a totally foreign and misunderstood culture, that this aspect cannot be adequately addressed in this post.

It is well documented that during the midterm of the war, when it rapidly became more unpopular in the US and Britain, a group of British military intelligence agents were arrested while casing Shiite religious shrines, dressed in Arab garb and harboring weapons and plastic explosives in their vehicle. Before they could be properly interrogated, the British army rammed an armored vehicle through police station walls and removed their agents. So, here we had at least one example of a specific mission to blow up Shiite mosques to foment sectarian conflict as a pretext to upscaling western military presence. As it became clear that there was systemic torture of war prisoners after leakage of the Abu Ghraib prison torture, so it can be logically surmised that the British conspiracy to conduct a terrorist attack on a Basra Shiite mosque was also systemic, and most likely included many other bombings by the CIA and Israeli Mossad, blamed on Sunni insurgents. This would indicate that western and Israeli intelligence operations were actually conducting terrorist attacks on civilians during prayers and religious ceremonies for their own political gain. Sadly, we were led to believe it was a war against terrorism.

Another example of mismanagement (incompetence) was the act of rewriting the text books for elementary grades under Bremer's people. The Americans working with a group of Iraqi educators created new history books with various revisions, one of which removed the name of Pres. Saddam Hussein, formerly characterized as a great leader. The Americans also decided to remove all references to Allah and Shiite religious history without first consulting the Iraqi educational council, who were deeply involved in the process ostensibly. When the books were published Iraqi planners went public to express their bitter disgust and humiliation at the act of westerners erasing such basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

For the icing on the cake, one must open his eyes to the larger view of state sponsored terror as illustrated in the Iraqi health ministry's population records. The following is a quote from an article I published regarding suppressed media information during the war;

By 2009 various well organized studies have cumulatively abridged Iraqi war casualty counts. John Tirman, (executive director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies) wrote a commentary for the February issue of The Nation, in which he propounded the statistics underscoring the consequence of the Bush anti-terrorist (terrorism) strategy. According to the best accumulated evidence there are approximately 1 million dead, 4.5 million displaced, 1 to 2 million widows and 5 million orphans. According to a statement by the Iraqi Health Ministry on Al-Iraqya TV in July 2006, many of these orphans were being housed in filthy prisons. As perhaps a sign of anti-American nationalism in January, an eight foot bronze replica of the shoe indignantly hurled at Pres. Bush by journalist, Muntadhar al-Zeidi, was erected at an orphanage complex in Tikrit. Days later it was unceremoniously removed at the behest of the central government which uses US liberated oil revenue to support the orphanage complex.

For your information, the five million orphans of Iraq represents about 50% of the nation's child population. We also know that tens of thousands of young widows became unwanted refugees in the border countries, many of them forced into prostitution.

One of the most suppressed pieces of critical knowledge includes a large number of hideous birth defects and child leukemia cases (we don't know the true figure) due to the large amount of depleted uranium used to enhance US artillery and other munitions. An unusual increase in child leukemia occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan and in other countries near the Iraqi border.

We need to be smart and take a closer look at not merely history, but more importantly how history is written before it happens and how the present is artfully narrated by the suppression of timely information, which the media is unable or perhaps unwilling to publish at the time it occurs.

There is another story behind this suppression of the media and how the US military controlled media information by various means of deception, even through violence and murder.

Keep digging and reading and connecting the dots. Its not about conspiracy theories, its about information and public perception.

a reply to: pavil

Slightly different perspective here:

I believe we should take a page from Teddy Roosevelt: Walk softly and carry a big stick.

We should NOT be the world's policeman. We should honor our alliances. We should maintain the vigil assuring the safety of the US and it's citizens.

When we sit down at the table to negotiate, the negotiation should begin with these words: "This is how it's going to be.." Negotiating, as normally conducted, benefits the weak side only. Negotiations gave us WWII. Negotiations gave us a victorious Vietnam as opposed to defeating them. Negotiations gave us North Korea. Negotiations have given us the Middle East in it's current incarnation.

When a rogue nation takes steps to threaten or harm the US, the result should be simple. Shock and Awe for a few days, and then we leave them alone. We take out command structures and capabilities. We take out all basic infrastructure. We never put boots on the ground unless we are willing to annex the country into becoming the 51st state. Negotiations begin with "this is how it's going to be". No options, no argument, just a basic understanding of what the only option is.

After 911 we should have sent Colin Powell to visit certain countries, including Saudi Arabia, and "negotiate" with them concerning cleaning up their back yards. No options, no arguing, just "this is how it's going to be". No need to invade Iraq. Afghanistan was a dry cesspool. All we needed was to destroy what little infrastructure they had, blockade the country and focus on finding Osama.