===
Any democracy or republic is vulnerable due to its soft underbelly and because they allow free speech and exchange of ideas.
College campuses have been infiltrated and made more radical by a co-ordinated effort on the part of Islamic ideologues who are bent on destroying our freedom and they use their hatred of Israel to shape the thinking of naive students, accommodating administrators and sympathetic left wing professors.
Click on this and you will get an idea of what is going on:
===
Krauthammer on Erdogan, Obama's closest friend and ally. (See 2 below.)
===
The idea that our air attacks have been effective is nonsense! (See 3 and 3a below.)
As I wrote, in a previous memo, after the first few attacks ISIS learned to disperse and Obama will not attack for fear of civilian casualties which ISIS proceeds to behead.
===
Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)
2) Erdogan’s Double Game
Our “ally” Turkey supports jihadists while joining the U.S.-led coalition against them.
For almost a month, Kobani Kurds have been trying to hold off Islamic State fighters. Outgunned, outmanned, and surrounded on three sides, the defending Kurds have begged Turkey to allow weapons and reinforcements through the border. Erdogan has refused even that, let alone intervening directly. Infuriated Kurds have launched demonstrations throughout Turkey protesting Erdogan’s deadly callousness. At least 21 demonstrators have been killed.
Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------His name was Bubba, he was from Mississippi and he needed a loan. So, he walked into a bank in New York City and asked for the loan Officer. He told the loan officer that he was going to Paris for an International Redneck Festival for two weeks and needed to borrow $5,000 and that he was not a depositor of the bank. The bank officer told him that the bank would need some form of security for the loan, so the Redneck handed over the keys to a new Ferrari. The car was parked on the street in front of the bank. The Redneck produced the title and everything checked out. The loan officer agreed to hold he car as collateral for the loan and apologized for having to charge 12% interest.
Later, the bank's president and its officers all enjoyed a good laugh at the Redneck from the south for using a $250,000 Ferrari as collateral for a $5,000 loan.
An employee of the bank then drove the Ferrari into the bank's private underground garage and parked it.
Two weeks later, the Redneck returned, repaid the $5,000 and the interest of $23.07.
The loan officer said, "Sir, we are very happy to have had your business, and this transaction has worked out very nicely, but we are a little puzzled. While you were away, we checked you out on Dunn & Bradstreet and found that you are distinguished alumni from Ole Miss University , a highly sophisticated investor and multi-millionaire with real estate and financial interests all over the world. Your investments include a large number of wind turbines around Sweetwater , Texas . What puzzles us is, why would you bother to borrow $5,000?"
The good 'ole boy replied, "Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $23.07 and expect it to be there when I return?"
His name was BUBBA.... Keep an eye on those southern boys! Just because we talk funny does not mean we are stupid.
2) Erdogan’s Double Game
Our “ally” Turkey supports jihadists while joining the U.S.-led coalition against them.
During the 1944 Warsaw uprising, Stalin ordered the advancing Red Army to stop at the outskirts of the city while the Nazis, for 63 days, annihilated the non-Communist Polish partisans. Only then did Stalin take Warsaw.
No one can match Stalin for merciless cynicism, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is offering a determined echo by ordering Turkish tanks massed on the Syrian border, within sight of the besieged Syrian town of Kobani, to sit and do nothing.
For almost a month, Kobani Kurds have been trying to hold off Islamic State fighters. Outgunned, outmanned, and surrounded on three sides, the defending Kurds have begged Turkey to allow weapons and reinforcements through the border. Erdogan has refused even that, let alone intervening directly. Infuriated Kurds have launched demonstrations throughout Turkey protesting Erdogan’s deadly callousness. At least 21 demonstrators have been killed.
Because Turkey has its own Kurdish problem — battling a Kurdish insurgency on and off for decades — Erdogan appears to prefer letting the Islamic State destroy the Kurdish enclave on the Syrian side of the border rather than lift a finger to save it. Perhaps later he will move in to occupy the rubble.
Moreover, Erdogan entertains a larger vision: making Turkey the hegemonic power over the Sunni Arabs, as in Ottoman times. The Islamic State is too radical and uncontrollable to be an ally in that mission. But it is Sunni. And it fights Shiites, Alawites, and Kurds. Erdogan’s main regional adversary is the Shiite-dominated rule of Syria’s Bashar Assad. Erdogan demands that the U.S. take the fight to Assad before Turkey will join the fight against the Islamic State.
It took Vice President Biden to accidentally blurt out the truth when he accused our alleged allies in the region of playing a double game — supporting the jihadists in Syria and Iraq, then joining the U.S.-led coalition against them. His abject apologies to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey notwithstanding, Biden was right.
The vaunted coalition that President Obama touts remains mostly fictional. Yes, it puts a Sunni face on the war. Which is important for show. But everyone knows that in real terms the operation remains almost exclusively American.
As designed, the outer limit of its objective is to roll back the Islamic State in Iraq and contain it in Syria. It is doing neither. Despite State Department happy talk about advances in Iraq, our side is suffering serious reverses near Baghdad and throughout Anbar province, which is reportedly near collapse. Baghdad itself is ripe for infiltration for a Tet-like offensive aimed at demoralizing both Iraq and the U.S.
As for Syria, what is Obama doing? First, he gives the enemy twelve days of warning about impending air attacks. We end up hitting empty buildings and evacuated training camps.
Next, we impose rules of engagement so rigid that we can’t make tactical adjustments. Our most reliable, friendly, battle-hardened “boots on the ground” in the region are the Kurds. So what have we done to relieve Kobani? About twenty airstrikes in a little more than ten days, says CENTCOM.
That’s barely two a day. On the day after the Islamic State entered Kobani, we launched five airstrikes. Result? We hit three vehicles, one artillery piece, and one military “unit.”
And damaged a tank. This, against perhaps 9,000 heavily armed Islamic State fighters. If this were not so tragic, it would be farcical.
No one is asking for U.S. ground troops. But even as an air campaign, this is astonishingly unserious. As former E.U. ambassador to Turkey Marc Pierini told the Wall Street Journal, “It [the siege] could have been meaningfully acted upon two weeks ago or so” — when Islamic State reinforcements were streaming in the open toward Kobani. “Now it is almost too late.”
Obama has committed the U.S. to war on the Islamic State. To then allow within a month an allied enclave to be overrun — and perhaps annihilated — would be a major blow.
Guerrilla war is a test of wills. Obama’s actual objectives — rollback in Iraq, containment in Syria — are not unreasonable. But they require commitment and determination. In other words, will. You can’t just make one speech declaring war, then disappear and go fundraising.
The indecisiveness and ambivalence so devastatingly described by both of Obama’s previous secretaries of defense, Leon Panetta and Bob Gates, are already beginning to characterize the Syria campaign.
The Iraqis can see it. The Kurds can feel it. The jihadists are counting on it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)
Air Force Pilots Say They're Flying Blind Against ISIS
Within the U.S. Air Force, there’s mounting frustration that the air campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq is moving far more slowly than expected. Instead of a fast-moving operation with hundreds of sorties flown in a single day—the kind favored by many in the air service—American warplanes are hitting small numbers of targets after a painstaking and cumbersome process.
The single biggest problem, current and former Air Force officers say, is the so-called kill-chain of properly identifying and making sure the right target is being attacked. At the moment, that process is very complicated and painfully slow.
“The kill-chain is very convoluted,” one combat-experienced Air Force A-10 Warthog pilot told The Daily Beast. “Nobody really has the control in the tactical environment.”
A major reason why: the lack of U.S. ground forces to direct American air power against ISIS positions. Air power, when it is applied in an area where the enemy is blended in with the civilian population, works best when there are troops on the ground who are able to call in strikes. From the sky, it can be hard to tell friend from foe. And by themselves, the GPS coordinates used to guide bombs aren’t nearly precise enough; landscape and weather can throw the coordinatesoff by as much as 500 feet. The planes need additional information from the guys on the ground. The only other option is to use laser-guided bombs, but even then the target has to be correctly indentified beforehand.
But putting the specialized troops the Pentagon calls “Joint Terminal Air Controllers,” or JTACs, into combat comes with a cost. “The problem with putting JTACs on the ground is that once you get American boots on the ground—and one of those guys gets captured and beheaded on national TV or media,” the A-10 pilot said.
The Pentagon has compensated for this, in part, by easing back in Syria on the restrictive rules used in Afghanistan to minimize civilian casualties. But in many other aspects, current and former Air Force personnel say, U.S. Central Command is fighting the war against ISIS in largely the same way it operates against the Taliban in Afghanistan. “The strategic problem posed by [ISIS] is different than that in Afghanistan,” one former senior Air Force official said. “So the similarity of the minimal application of airpower, along with excessive micromanagement by the CENTCOM bureaucracy, is a symptom of not recognizing that this is a different strategic problem.”
After all, ISIS isn’t simply a collection of terrorists. The group holds territory, and manages an inventory of heavy military and civilian equipment. There’s a reason they call themselves the Islamic State. So instead of worrying about individual air strikes, this former official said, the CENTCOM needs to run a wider more free-ranging air war where more targets are hit much more quickly. “Very few in the military today have experience in planning and executing a comprehensive air campaign—their experience is only in the control of individual strikes against individual targets,” the official added. “There needs to be constant 24/7 overwatch, and immediate attack of any [ISIS] artillery, people, vehicles, or facilities that they are occupying.”
But that is a view shared mainly by those within the Air Force—which has, for decades, argued that it has the ability to win wars though strategic bombing.
Even in the case of the campaign against ISIS, there are many officers from the Army, Navy and even the Air Force who told The Daily Beast that they agree with the restraint shown by CENTCOM leadership—noting it is pointless to bomb the wrong target and antagonize the local population.
Further, the challenge for CENTCOM is further compounded by the lack of workable intelligence in Syria. It’s hard to untangle the convoluted alliances and entanglements between friend or foe. Often, so-called moderate rebel forces cooperate with the hardcore Islamic fighters in their fight against the Syrian government or even ISIS. (That’s why, late last month, a moderate camp wasalmost hit by an allied airstrike; the bombs were meant for the al Qaeda outpost next door.) Additionally, there is little to no cooperation or coordination with moderate rebel forces and the U.S. military.
“The kill-chain is very convoluted. Nobody really has the control in the tactical environment.”
Because of those factors, there are often too few suitable targets to attack, sources told The Daily Beast. A partial solution to that—even though it is not quite as effective as having troops on the ground—is to use an airborne controller. That usually means a low, slow flying warplane like the Air Force’s A-10 Warthog, which can stay in a target area for a long time and tell other aircraft where to drop their weapons. “It doesn’t have to be an A-10, it can be an Apache [attack helicopter], but they are slow and vulnerable—so that’s one drawback for a helicopter vice fixed-wing,” the A-10 pilot said.
He conceded that the Air Force does have some F-15E Strike Eagle supersonic fighter-bomber crews who are trained to do that mission too. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps also use the supersonic F/A-18 Hornet strike fighter to guide other jets to their targets.
Right now, there are no Warthogs deployed to the fight against ISIS, however the Indiana Air National Guard will send a dozen of the jets to the area this month. The Army, however, has deployed some AH-64 Apache gunships into Iraq to strike at ISIS from close in.
“We’re using AH-64s because they’re the best platform to get in and visually identify the targets and either take them out or designate for someone else to take them out,” said one former Army aviator with extensive Apache experience. “ISIS does have armor, so Hellfires [anti-tank missiles] will be very effective against them, and we all know how devastating a weapon the 30mm [cannon] is against troops.”
But the Apaches are short range and need maintenance troops to deploy with them into a location within Iraq itself. “The only disadvantage is contrary to President Obama, we definitely have ‘boots on the ground,’” the former Army officer said. “They’re unsupportable otherwise.”
There’s another reason the campaign against ISIS is proceeding slowly: the unwieldy coalition of foreign countries put together by the U.S. to fight in this new war. There are differing ways of doing things and different countries have different objectives, which makes for a long process, the A-10 pilot said.
There have also been instances during this air war when combat aircraft are not available in time to strike a target that pops up. For example, the A-10 pilot said, if a Predator drone finds a target, it can take warplanes like a B-1 bomber or an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter—up to two hours sometimes—to arrive at the target area. Often times, the target is simply gone by then. “You bring in assets like the A-10 or Apaches, and you bring them in close, that’s a whole lot easier to handle,” the A-10 pilot said. “That’s one way to speed it up.”
3a )UN: Hundreds of Civilians Will Be 'Massacred' If ISIS Takes Kobani
At least 500 civilians who remain trapped in the Syrian Kurdish border town of Kobani are likely to be "massacred" if it falls to the Islamic State group, the U.N. envoy to Syria warned Friday, calling on the world to help avert a catastrophe as the extremists pushed deeper into the embattled town.
Staffan de Mistura raised the specter of some of the worst genocides of the 20th century during a news conference in Geneva, where he held up a map of the town along the Syria-Turkey border and said a U.N. analysis shows only a small corridor remains open for people to enter or flee Kobani.
The dramatic warning came as the Islamic State group pushed into Kobani from the south and east, taking over most of the so-called "Kurdish security quarter" — an area where Kurdish militiamen who are struggling to defend the town maintain security buildings and where the police station, the municipality and other local government offices are located.
The onslaught by the Islamic State group on Kobani, which began in mid-September, has forced more than 200,000 to flee across the border into Turkey. Activists say the fighting has already killed more than 500 people.
"The city is in danger," said Farhad Shami, a Kurdish activist in Kobani reached by phone from Beirut. He reported heavy fighting on the town's southern and eastern sides and said the Islamic State group was bringing in more reinforcements.
U.S.-led airstrikes against the extremists appear to have failed to blunt their push on Kobani. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that with the new advances, the Islamic State group was now in control of 40 percent of the town.
The Observatory, which collects its information from a network of activists on the ground in Syria, said a suicide bomber from the Islamic State group blew his car up near the Grand Mosque just west of the security quarter, but there was no immediate word of casualties.
The U.S. Central Command said in a statement that the U.S.-led coalition conducted nine airstrikes in Syria on Thursday and Friday. It said strikes near Kobani destroyed two Islamic State training facilities, as well as vehicles and tanks. Another strike in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour — controlled by the extremists — destroyed an Islamic State armored vehicle staging facility, it said.
On Friday, the militants shelled Kobani's single border crossing with Turkey in an effort to capture it and seal off the town, a local Kurdish official and Syrian activists said.
The official, Idriss Nassan, said Islamic State fighters aim to seize the crossing in order to close the noose around the town's Kurdish defenders and prevent anyone from entering or leaving Kobani.
By midmorning Friday, occasional gunfire and explosions that appeared to be rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells could be heard from across the border in Turkey, and plumes of smoke were seen rising in the distance. The Observatory said the militants shelled several areas in Kobani, including the border crossing.
"Daesh is doing all it can to take the border crossing point through the farmlands east of the city," Nassan said, using an Arabic acronym to refer to the Islamic State group. "They think there might be help (for the Kurdish militia) coming through the crossing so they want to control the border."
In Geneva, de Mistura said that a U.N. analysis of the situation on the ground shows that only a small portion of the town remains open for people to enter or flee. He said there were 500 to 700 elderly people and other civilians still trapped there while 10,000 to 13,000 remain stuck in an area nearby, close to the border.
De Mistura invoked the genocides in Rwanda in 1994 and in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995 as he appealed to the world to prevent another catastrophe.
If the town falls to the Islamic State fighters, "we know what they are capable of doing," said the Italian-Swedish diplomat, who was appointed to the U.N. post in July.
The civilians of Kobani "will be most likely massacred," de Mistura said. "When there is an imminent threat to civilians, we cannot, we should not be silent."
"You remember Srebrenica? We do. We never forgot. And probably we never forgave ourselves for that," he said. In both Rwanda and Srebrenica, the U.N. had troops on the ground but they failed to save the lives of the civilians they were mandated to protect.
There are no U.N. troops in Syria. Turkey has deployed troops and tanks across the border, but despite U.S. pressure, Ankara has said it will not join the fight unless the U.S.-led coalition also goes after the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
De Mistura appealed to Turkish authorities to allow volunteers and equipment to flow into Kobani and help its Syrian Kurdish defenders.
Without more such help, he added, Kobani is "likely to fall."
The fight over Kobani has eclipsed the larger Syrian civil war, where Assad's forces continue to fight rebels seeking to topple him in many parts of the country.
On Friday, activists said at least nine civilians were killed in a government airstrike that targeted the village of Harra in the southern province of Daraa. More than 20 people were also killed a day earlier in government airstrikes in Damascus suburbs, they said.
The Syrian National Coalition, Syria's Western-backed main opposition group, accused Assad of "openly exploiting" the coalition's war against the Islamic State group to continue killing Syrians.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment