Back in Iraq

Yes, you're right. We never really left.

U.S. jet fighters hit artillery being used by the militant group called the Islamic State in northern Iraq on Friday, the first of what is expected to be a series of American strikes meant to halt the Sunni extremist advance on the Kurdish capital of Erbil, the Pentagon said.

  WSJ

So, it wasn’t true when Iraqi officials claimed it yesterday, but now it is today. Friday. First US airstrikes. According to the Pentagon.

Officials said it was too soon to tell if the current campaign would last weeks or days, but said they expect more strikes by U.S. fighter jets, as early as this weekend.

[...]

"The enemy gets a vote," said a senior defense official. "If they stop, we stop. If they attack we bring down the hammer."

Give me a second.

I’m back.  Sorry, I had to turn away from my keyboard to puke.

Mr. Obama authorized the targeted airstrikes and emergency-assistance missions, saying the U.S. must act to protect American personnel and prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.

Targeted strikes against ISIS is obviously not remotely the same as a full-scale invasion of Iraq, but whatever else is true, and whatever one’s opinions are on this latest bombing, it is self-evidently significant that, as the NYT’s Peter Baker wrote today, “Mr. Obama became the fourth president in a row to order military action in that graveyard of American ambition” known as Iraq.

[...]

The above-documented parade of “Saddam-is-worse-than-Hitler” campaigns [ed: see the article for list of US interventions in Iraq] was surrounded by stints of U.S. arming and funding of the very same Saddam (the same, of course, was true of the Taliban precursors, Gadhaffi, Iran, Manuel Noriega, and virtually every other Latest Villain who needed to be bombed; the US was roughly allied with ISIS allies in Syria and American allies fund ISIS itself).

[...]

It is simply mystifying how anyone can look at U.S. actions in the Middle East and still believe that the goal of its military deployments is humanitarianism. The U.S. government does not oppose tyranny and violent oppression in the Middle East. To the contrary, it is and long has been American policy to do everything possible to subjugate the populations of that region with brutal force – as conclusively demonstrated by stalwart U.S. support for the region’s worst oppressors. Or, as Hillary Clinton so memorably put it in 2009: “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.”

[...]

[H]as the hideous aftermath of the NATO intervention in Libya – hailed as a grand success for “humanitarian interventions” – not taught the crucial lessons that (a) bombing for ostensibly “humanitarian” ends virtually never fulfills the claimed goals but rather almost always makes the situation worse; (b) the U.S. military is not designed, and is not deployed, for “humanitarian” purposes?; and (c) the U.S. military is not always capable of “doing something” positive about every humanitarian crisis even if that were really the goal of U.S. officials?

[...]

“Humanitarianism” is the pretty packaging in which all wars – even the most blatantly aggressive ones – are wrapped, but it is almost never the actual purpose. There are often numerous steps the U.S. could take to advance actually humanitarian goals, but those take persistence and resources, and entail little means of control, and are thus usually ignored in favor of blowing things and people up with Freedom Bombs.

  Glenn Greenwald

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.