Iraq – Page 4 – The Burning Platform

Syrian Crisis: What Will Happen Next?

The Syrian crisis and the confluence of clashing interests there was entirely predictable. In fact, I wrote an article on my former website in 2010 outlining the potential for Syria as a high value catalyst for global conflict titled “Will Globalists Trigger Yet Another World War?”

In it, I summarized the dubious history of wars initiated over the past century, including the nature of false flags and false paradigms created by globalists designed to divide nations and peoples and turn them against each other. This strategy of engineered war (along with engineered economic collapse) has been used time and time again by the elites to artificially generate chaos and then consolidate and centralize power while the masses are blinded by confusion.

Even back then, the problem with Syria seemed obvious:

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“…We have a nuclear armed Israel itching to attack Iran. We have Iran engaged in a defense pact with Syria against Israel. We have Syria with Russian navy bases and weapons on its soil, and we have the U.S. rampaging through the Middle East encroaching on the borders of Pakistan and Yemen, essentially pissing off everyone. What we have is a Globalist made recipe for disaster, using the same ingredients they have used for the last several major wars…”

Only a year after I published the piece the civil uprising in Syria began, starting with the “Daraa protest movement”, aided by covert intelligence agencies including the CIA.

In 2012, I decided to reexamine my original theory on Syria as a global catalyst in my article “Syria And Iran Dominoes Lead To World War.”

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Donald Trump: Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi Made the World Safer

Guest Post by Jake Anderson

(ANTIMEDIA) In perhaps an accidental moment of lucid foreign policy insight over the weekend, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump stated the Middle East would be better off today if Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi were still in power. The statement came during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press and was reiterated during a rally in Franklin, Tennessee, where 1,500 people listened to Trump sound off on the United States’ strategy of arming rebels in Libya prior to the overthrow of its dictator in 2011.

Trump likened the scenario to what is currently happening in Syria, where he says the terror group ISIS emerged from a power vacuum left after Saddam Hussein was deposed in Iraq. This is a refrain from his statements during the second GOP debate, during which he said the world would be safer if the long-time dictator had remained in power.

Trump thinks the same of President Bashar Assad of Syria. Though he is “probably a bad guy,” the Middle East is safer with him, Trump apparently believes.

“You can make the case, if you look at Libya, look at what we did there — it’s a mess — if you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look what we did there — it’s a mess — it’s [Syria] going to be same thing,” he said.

During the Franklin rally, Trump pointed out the relative lack of terrorist activity in Iraq during Hussein’s reign.

“You know what he used to do to terrorists?” Trump asked the crowd. “A one day trial and shoot him…and the one day trial usually lasted five minutes, right? There was no terrorism then.”

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Republicans Can’t Face the Truth About Iraq

Guest Post by Eric Margolis

Gov. Jeb Bush repeated one of the biggest falsehoods of our time during the recent presidential candidate debate: “we were misled (into the Iraq War) by faulty intelligence.”

US intelligence was not “misled.” It was ordered by the real, de facto president, Dick Cheney, to provide excuses for a war of aggression against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

PM Tony Blair, forced British intelligence services to “sex up” reports that Iraq had nuclear weapons; he purged the government and the venerable broadcaster BBC of journalists who failed to amplify Blair’s lies. Bush and Blair reportedly discussed painting a US Air Force plane in UN colors and getting it to buzz Iraqi anti-aircraft sites in hope the Iraqis would fire on it. Bush told Blair that after conquering Iraq, he intended to invade Iran, Syria, Libya and Pakistan.

In fact, Iraq had no “weapons of mass destruction,” save some rusty barrels of mustard and nerve gas that had been supplied by the US and Britain for use against Iran. I broke this story from Baghdad back in late 1990.

Jeb Bush Calls Iraq War a “Good Deal,” Expresses Support for Torture and NSA Spying While Campaigning in Iowa

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

Apparently jealous that Hillary Clinton is hogging all the embarrassing headlines, Jeb Bush decided to go on a neocon diatribe while campaigning in Iowa.

Just in case there’s any doubt about how anti-freedom he is, Jeb! decided to make things crystal clear. From him calling the Iraq War a “good deal,” to expressing support for torture and unconstitutional NSA spying, the man is a dyed in the wool authoritarian. Which is precisely why establishment Republican oligarchs love him.

Let’s tackle the torture angle first. The New York Times reported the following:

DAVENPORT, Iowa — Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Thursday declined to rule out resuming the use of torture under some circumstances by the U.S. government.

“I don’t want to make a definitive, blanket kind of statement,” Bush told an audience of Iowa Republicans, when asked whether he would keep in place or repeal President Barack Obama’s executive order banning so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the CIA.

A candidate for President of the United States won’t rule out torture. Yeah, no big deal.

The CIA used waterboarding, slapping, nudity, sleep deprivation, humiliation and other methods to coerce al-Qaida detainees — methods the military would be prohibited from using on prisoners of war.

A Senate report released last year cited CIA records in concluding that the techniques were more brutal than previously disclosed, that the CIA lied about them, and that they failed to produce unique, life-saving intelligence. The CIA and its defenders take issue with the report.

Jeb Bush said he believed that the techniques were effective in producing intelligence, but that “now we’re in a different environment.”

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THE REAL CAUSE OF THE RISE OF ISIS

Why climate change of course, isn’t it obvious? To be fair, the author is right that the area is experiencing extreme drought, but doesn’t a river (Euphrates) run through it? Look at the reservoirs in google earth and it doesn’t appear the levels have dropped much. Fucking libs are a one-trick pony.

Republicans Are Still Totally Wrong About ISIS

—By Tim McDonnell

| Tue Jul. 21, 2015 4:16 PM EDT

An Iraqi soldier tracks an ISIS sniper near Tikrit in April. Sebastian Backhaus/ZUMA

On Monday, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley made an astute observation about ISIS in an interview with Bloomberg.

“One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation-state of Syria, the rise of ISIS, was the effect of climate change and the mega-drought that affected that region, wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, created a humanitarian crisis [that] created the…conditions of extreme poverty that has led now to the rise of ISIL and this extreme violence,” said the former Maryland governor.

Republicans were quick to seize on the comment as an indication of O’Malley’s weak grasp of foreign policy. Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, said the suggestion of a link between ISIS’s rise to power and climate change was “absurd” and a sign that “no one in the Democratic Party has the foreign policy vision to keep America safe.”

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More Idiocy From Neocons

Insanity’s definition is sending more U.S. ground troops to Iraq

non-intervention.com

By MIKE | Published: JUNE 1, 2015

There seems to be great Republican resistance to the idea that their interventions in Iraq and the Muslim world are the main cause of both the mess in Iraq and the growing and increasingly powerful worldwide Islamist movement. To the extent that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic senators and congressmen joined the Republicans in illegally delegating the war-declaring power to George W. Bush there is a point to the Republicans’ resistance. The correct formulation of the statement is that both parties are equally responsible for the mess in Iraq and for the formidable Islamist foe that now exists. Also a correct statement is that the bulk of both parties now want the United States to become an even stronger motivator of and recruiter for the Islamists by expanding the military re-intervention in Iraq that began in the summer of 2014. Before that occurs it would be best to review a few facts:

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The Delusional World Of Imperial Washington

Guest Post by TomDispatch.com

Think of this as a little imperial folly update — and here’s the backstory. In the years after invading Iraq and disbanding Saddam Hussein’s military, the U.S. sunk about $25 billion into “standing up” a new Iraqi army. By June 2014, however, that army, filled with at least 50,000 “ghost soldiers,” was only standing in the imaginations of its generals and perhaps Washington. When relatively small numbers of Islamic State (IS) militants swept into northern Iraq, it collapsed, abandoning four cities — including Mosul, the country’s second largest — and leaving behind enormous stores of U.S. weaponry, ranging from tanks and Humvees to artillery and rifles. In essence, the U.S. was now standing up its future enemy in a style to which it was unaccustomed and, unlike the imploded Iraqi military, the forces of the Islamic State proved quite capable of using that weaponry without a foreign trainer or adviser in sight.

In response, the Obama administration dispatched thousands of new advisers and trainers and began shipping in piles of new weaponry to re-equip the Iraqi army. It also filled Iraqi skies with U.S. planes armed with their own munitions to destroy, among other things, some of that captured U.S. weaponry. Then it set to work standing up a smaller version of the Iraqi army. Now, skip nearly a year ahead and on a somewhat lesser scale the whole process has just happened again. Less than two weeks ago, Islamic State militants took Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province. Iraqi army units, including the elite American-trained Golden Division, broke and fled, leaving behind — you’ll undoubtedly be shocked to hear — yet another huge cache of weaponry and equipment, including tanks, more than 100 Humvees and other vehicles, artillery, and so on.

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Can’t Make This Up – U.S. Providing Aid in Fight Against ISIS in Iraq Alongside Iranian Troops

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This — although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense — is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.

– George Orwell, 1984

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WAR AGAINST IRAN HAS BEGUN

This attack on Yemen by Saudi Arabia/United States is part of a larger plan to create a conflict with Iran. Again, the U.S. has actually armed the rebels in Yemen, just as we armed ISIS in our failed effort to oust Assad. This begins to explain why Saudi Arabia and the U.S. have continued to pump oil and fill our storage facilities to the brim at low prices. The price of oil has already jumped 10% in the last two days as fears of Iran/Yemen blocking oil flow from the Gulf.

It seems clearer every day that the U.S. promotes chaos in the Middle East to make sure no one country gets too powerful. We attacked Tikrit yesterday to help our “allies” from Iraq defeat the ISIS terrorists who we armed to fight our enemy in Syria. Hysterically, it is Iranian armed forces who have been helping Iraq fight ISIS, but Iran is our enemy. Right?

Is it all clear now?

And the average ignorant American doesn’t even know we are militarily engaged in the Middle East, but they are fully supportive of defeating whatever existential threat our government creates this week. I wonder how many Americans could find Yemen on a world map.

Guess who is really happy? The American arms dealer corporations. More “political contributions” (bribes) to the Congress critters coming.

A NATION OF BLITHERING IDIOTS

In separate polls, 75% of Americans think the sun goes around the earth, 85% don’t know who is buried in Grant’s tomb, 62% don’t know the name of the Vice President, and 98% plan on purchasing Kim Kardashian’s selfie book of ass shots.

If you asked the very same people who think we should send young men to the Middle East to fight a phantom terrorist organization that we created and armed to fight Assad what ISIS stands for, their expression would look like this:

These morons can’t even find Iraq on a map, and they want to send troops to die defending America from this existential threat of 20,000 Muslims with machetes and pickup trucks.

WTF do these people think troops on the ground will accomplish? Can you tell a friendly ragheaded Muslim from a terrorist ragheaded Muslim? Do idiot Americans think we won the Iraq or Afghanistan wars? It’s now been 13 years and Iraq and Afghanistan are more fucked up than ever. They are crawling with enemies now. There were no terrorists in Iraq in 2002. Now it has become a never ending quagmire of violence, terrorism, war and destruction. And it’s our fault.

And the blithering idiots in this country actually think we can defeat ISIS by sending more young men to die. And note which party truly loves war. I can’t wait for the next Republican President so we can go to war with even more countries.

According to a poll from YouGov, just over half of the American public would support a deployment of ground troops to fight ISIS. Democrats are divided on the question of ground troops while Republicans overwhelmingly support it. One of the primary reasons 53 percent of Americans support sending ground troops is that there are few alternatives.

Even though air strikes have stalled the momentum of ISIS militants in Iraq, less than one in four Americans believe the group can be defeated through air power alone. However, some good news has emerged from Northern Iraq over the past few days with news that government troops have forced ISIS combatants to flee Tikrit. A confident Iraqi military gaining momentum may well provide the American public with another alternative in the fight against ISIS.

You will find more statistics at Statista

BREAKING BAD (DEBT) – EPISODE THREE

In Part One of this three part article I laid out the groundwork of how the Federal Reserve is responsible for the excessive level of debt in our society and how it has warped the thinking of the American people, while creating a tremendous level of mal-investment. In Part Two I focused on the Federal Reserve/Federal Government scheme to artificially boost the economy through the issuance of subprime debt to create a false auto boom. In this final episode, I’ll address the disastrous student loan debacle and the dreadful global implications of $200 trillion of debt destroying the lives of citizens around the world.

Getting a PhD in Subprime Debt

“When easy money stopped, buyers couldn’t sell. They couldn’t refinance. First sales slowed, then prices started falling and then the housing bubble burst. Housing prices crashed. We know the rest of the story. We are still mired in the consequences. Can someone please explain to me how what is happening in higher education is any different?This bubble is going to burst.” – Mark Cuban

Now we get to the subprimiest of subprime debt – student loans. Student loans are not officially classified as subprime debt, but let’s compare borrowers. A subprime borrower has a FICO score of 660 or below, has defaulted on previous obligations, and has limited ability to meet monthly living expenses. A student loan borrower doesn’t have a credit score because they have no credit, have no job with which to pay back the loan, and have no ability other than the loan proceeds to meet their monthly living expenses. And in today’s job environment, they are more likely to land a waiter job at TGI Fridays than a job in their major. These loans are nothing more than deep subprime loans made to young people who have little chance of every paying them off, with hundreds of billions in losses being borne by the ever shrinking number of working taxpaying Americans.

Student loan debt stood at $660 billion when Obama was sworn into office in 2009. The official reported default rate was 7.9%. Obama and his administration took complete control of the student loan market shortly after his inauguration. They have since handed out a staggering $500 billion of new loans (a 76% increase), and the official reported default rate has soared by 43% to 11.3%. Of course, the true default rate is much higher. The level of mal-investment and utter stupidity is astounding, even for the Federal government. Just some basic unequivocal facts can prove my case.

There were 1.67 million Class of 2014 students who took the SAT. Only 42.6% of those students met the minimum threshold of predicted success in college (a B minus average). That amounts to 711,000 high school seniors intellectually capable of succeeding in college. This level has been consistent for years. So over the last five years only 3.5 million high school seniors should have entered college based on their intellectual ability to succeed. Instead, undergraduate college enrollment stands at 19.5 million. Colleges in the U.S. are admitting approximately 4.5 million more students per year than are capable of earning a degree. This waste of time and money can be laid at the feet of the Federal government. Obama and his minions believe everyone deserves a college degree, even if they aren’t intellectually capable of earning it, because it’s only fair. No teenager left behind, without un-payable debt.