Syria/Iraq

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Vrede too
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Re: Syria/Iraq

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rstrong wrote:
Nor the real world.

Republicans in Congress declared Obama's military action in Libya to be unconstitutional, because it was done without Congress's authorization. President Bush I did the same, ordered troops into Panama in 1989 to overthrow General Manuel Noriega. As with Obama, President Bush consulted with Congressional leaders but did not seek or receive Congress' authorization.

In reality the legal issues were settled by the Office of Legal Counsel when the same thing was done with troops sent into Haiti and Bosnia in the 1990s.
"real world" ain't necessarily the legal world. If Congress want's to add Syria to the articles of impeachment, fine with me. We'll see who's left to defend Dolt .45 on the point. Lots more people besides Republicans in Congress declared Obama's military action in Libya to be unconstitutional.

I thought that judges settle legal issues rather than the underlings of the alleged perp. Anyhow, the Office of Legal Counsel doesn't make your point. Obama overruled it to attack Libya.
2 Top Lawyers Lost to Obama in Libya War Policy Debate

WASHINGTON — President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged....
Such executive actions are only legal in a world where bombing is not “hostilities".

Libya and Panama did not turn out well and Haiti was iffy, and precedent does not make right.
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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Discovery Channel tonight:

Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS

Hell on Earth Review

Very well made, largely Syrians in their own words, good historic context, doesn't pull punches in also faulting the West.
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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Re: Syria/Iraq

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U.S. saw chemical weapons activity at Syrian base struck in April

Pentagon, State Department appear surprised by Trump's new red line on Syria

What "potential preparations"? You load an existing shell or bomb and use it. I detest Assad but why would he use chemical weapons when he's winning? Something smells here and the Pentagon and State Department surprise only serves to confirm it.
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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Vrede too wrote:
Wed Jun 28, 2017 2:00 pm
Something smells here and the Pentagon and State Department surprise only serves to confirm it.
Military historian Gwynne Dyer: Cui Bono?
Al-Qaeda – and probably several other rebel groups – have access to chemical weapons. The country was awash with them before the war, because the ability to make a mass chemical-weapons attack on Israel was Syria’s only deterrent against an Israeli nuclear attack. (Assad, and his father before him, understood clearly that Syria would never be allowed to have nuclear weapons of its own.)

Chemical weapons were stored in military facilities all over Syria, and at one point half the country was under rebel control. So of course the rebels have had some for years, and are known to have used them on occasion in their own internecine wars. Would al-Qaeda have hesitated to use them on innocent civilians order to trigger an American attack on the Syrian regime? Of course not.

The results have already been spectacular. The developing Russian-American alliance in Syria is broken, the prospect of an imposed peace that sidelines the rebels – indeed, of any peace at all – has retreated below the horizon, and Rex Tillerson has just declared that “steps are underway” to form an international coalition to force Bashar al-Assad from power. Not a bad return on a small investment.
On the other hand...
Vrede too wrote:
Wed Jun 28, 2017 2:00 pm
I detest Assad but why would he use chemical weapons when he's winning?
But we should also consider the possibility that Bashar al-Assad actually did order the attack. Why would it do that? For exactly the same reason: to trigger an American attack on the Syrian regime. From a policy perspective, that could make perfectly good sense.

The American attack didn’t really hurt much, after all, and it has already smashed a developing Russian-American relationship in Syria that could have ended up imposing unwelcome conditions on Assad. Indeed, Moscow and Washington might ultimately have decided that ejecting Assad (though not the entire regime) from power was an essential part of the peace settlement.

Assad doesn’t want foreigners deciding his fate, and he doesn’t want a “premature” peace settlement either. He wants the war to go on long enough for him to reconquer and reunite the whole country (with Russian help, of course). So use a little poison gas, and Donald Trump will obligingly over-react. That should end the threat of US-Russian collaboration in Syria.
The results in that regard have been spectacular too.

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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Thanks. That 2nd hypothetical feels like a stretch to me - too many uncontrollable possible external reactions. I'm not saying that al-Assad didn't do it, just that I would think that his motivations would be different or include more.

At least one weapons expert emphatically stated that the April attack looked more like a device exploded on the ground than a dropped bomb, which fits the rebel scenario, but I wouldn't know.
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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Vrede too wrote:
Fri Oct 21, 2016 5:49 pm
Assad and Russia have been rightly condemned for what they're doing to the civilian population in their efforts to root out the rebels. It will be interesting to see if the same standards are applied to the US, Kurds and Iraqi government in their efforts to root out the Daesh rebels in Mosul.
Iraq and allies violated international law in Mosul battle: Amnesty

Amnesty International said on Tuesday tactics used by Iraqi forces and their U.S.-led coalition allies in the battle for Mosul violated international humanitarian law and might amount to war crimes.

The rights group said in a report the Islamic State militant group had also flagrantly violated humanitarian law by deliberately putting civilians in harm's way to shield their fighters and impede the advance of Iraqi and coalition forces....
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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Today is the 15th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

I was on a layover in Amsterdam and joined a spontaneous demonstration outside the US Embassy there. In late January or early February I marched with about 75K folks against the war also in Amsterdam. The week before the war started I got arrested protesting the imminent attack at the US naval base in Rota, Spain.

Sigh, I wish we'd been successful.
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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Vrede too wrote:
Mon Mar 19, 2018 9:13 pm
Today is the 15th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

I was on a layover in Amsterdam and joined a spontaneous demonstration outside the US Embassy there. In late January or early February I marched with about 75K folks against the war also in Amsterdam. The week before the war started I got arrested protesting the imminent attack at the US naval base in Rota, Spain.

Sigh, I wish we'd been successful.
Thanks for the reminder.
What a lousy excuse for a neverending war and somehow bush is remembered fondly these days.
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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Re: Syria/Iraq

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We've seen the movie - double secret probation doesn't end well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0cF2piwjYQ

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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Amnesty International: NOWHERE TO RUN
TRAPPED IN RAQQA, SYRIA


THE BATTLE FOR RAQQA

The four-month military operation to oust the armed group calling itself Islamic State (IS) from Raqqa, its self-declared capital in Syria, killed hundreds of civilians, injured many more and laid waste to the city between June and August 2017. Residents were trapped as fighting raged on Raqqa’s streets while a constant barrage of air bombardments and artillery strikes rocked the city day and night. With IS mines and snipers blocking escape routes out of the city, civilians desperately fled from place to place in search of safety. Some were killed in their homes; some in the very places where they had sought refuge, and others as they tried to flee.

Shortly before the start of the military campaign, US Defense Secretary James Mattis promised a “war of annihilation” against IS. The impact on civilians was devastating.

Image

THE MILITARY OPERATION

Supporting Kurdish-led Syrian Defence Forces (SDF) on the ground, US forces and their Coalition partners launched tens of thousands of air and artillery strikes on Raqqa during the operation. In the words of Army Sergeant Major John Wayne Troxell: “In five months they [US Marines] fired 30,000 artillery rounds on ISIS targets… They fired more rounds in five months in Raqqa, Syria, than any other Marine or Army battalion, since the Vietnam War… Every minute of every hour we were putting some kind of fire on ISIS in Raqqa, whether it was mortars, artillery, rockets, Hellfires, armed drones, you name it”.

US forces launched more than 90% of the air bombardments and all of the artillery strikes. British and French forces carried out the remainder of the air strikes and other countries in the 70-member Coalition refueled planes and helped to identify targets.

US Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend claimed that the Coalition’s offensive on Raqqa had been “the most precise air campaign in the history”. The reality on the ground could not be more different. ...
:(
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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Re: Syria/Iraq

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http://www.blueridgedebate.com/forum/vi ... qqa#p78602
Vrede too wrote:
Sat Aug 26, 2017 11:07 am
I've been struck in the interviews of Mosul residents with how many described 4 years of ISIS being horrible, then saying that the period of US bombing and Iraqi assault was the worst and most frightening. I'll bet it's the same in Raqqa.
Image

Syria: Unprecedented investigation reveals US-led Coalition killed more than 1,600 civilians in Raqqa ‘death trap’

Amnesty International and Airwars launch interactive website documenting hundreds of civilian casualties
Most comprehensive investigation into civilian deaths in modern warfare
US, UK and French forces still in denial, admitting to 10% of killings


The US-led military Coalition must end almost two years of denial about the massive civilian death toll and destruction it unleashed in the Syrian city of Raqqa, Amnesty International and Airwars said today as they launched a new data project on the offensive to oust the armed group calling itself “Islamic State” (IS).

The interactive website, Rhetoric versus Reality: How the ‘most precise air campaign in history’ left Raqqa the most destroyed city in modern times, is the most comprehensive investigation into civilian deaths in a modern conflict. Collating almost two years of investigations, it gives a brutally vivid account of more than 1,600 civilian lives lost as a direct result of thousands of US, UK and French air strikes and tens of thousands of US artillery strikes in the Coalition’s military campaign in Raqqa from June to October 2017....

Thousands of civilians were killed or injured in the US-led Coalition’s offensive to rid Raqqa of IS, whose snipers and mines had turned the city into a death trap. Many of the air bombardments were inaccurate and tens of thousands of artillery strikes were indiscriminate, so it is no surprise they killed and injured many hundreds of civilians.
-- Donatella Rovera, Senior Crisis Response Adviser at Amnesty International

“Coalition forces razed Raqqa, but they cannot erase the truth. Amnesty International and Airwars call upon the Coalition forces to end their denial about the shocking scale of civilian deaths and destruction caused by their offensive in Raqqa.”

“The Coalition needs to fully investigate what went wrong at Raqqa and learn from those lessons, to prevent inflicting such tremendous suffering on civilians caught in future military operations,” said Chris Woods, Director of Airwars. ...
:cry:
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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Re: Syria/Iraq

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Amid scattered fighting, Erdogan threatens to restart Syria operation

Did anyone really believe that a project that VP Q-tip was point person on would be a success?

Comments:
It took longer for Pence and Pompeo to travel back from Turkey than the cease fire lasted.
If you put perishable food out when that cease-fire was announced, it’d still be edible when the cease-fire ended.
I’m still digesting that burrito I ate when the cease fire was announced.
Good, because Trump and clowns need to eat some crow.
The cease-fire lasted longer than any given time that Trump told the truth
Trump said, “The Kurds are very happy about this.” He should go to Syria, unprotected, and meet with them to celebrate.
Awesome Cease Fire Vice President Pence!
The Art of the Deal is Alive!
But vice-dotard Pence insisted yesterday there is a "winning" cease-fire???
Wha' happened, Pence???
In other news trump Istanbul hotel is just fine. Right, trumpeters?
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Re: Syria/Iraq

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