Heavy Weapons Package for Kurd National Guard in D.C. Plans?

Since the abandonment of Iraq by the U.S. Government and Obama policy of arming extremist Sunni forces to attack the Syrian Dentist-President Assad the nation of Iraq has become destabilized. Obama administration difficulties of working with President Maliki brought about a complete withdrawal of U.S military forces enabling gradual deteriorization and polarization of Iraq politically. The Sunni terror extremist group ISIS that G.W. Bush warned about in 2006 when he said ‘they want to form a caliphate’ has today formed a Caliphate leading forces to purge Caliphate held areas of Iraq of Christians-even cutting heads off children. Azidis-a religious minority, have been purged, enslaved, and or  murdered too and have become the focus of U.S. and international relief forces as they are threatened with death. An accurate political and military intervention in a timely way is difficult for U.S. presidential leadership to make.

Appropriate, measured responses regarding military weapons supplies and interventions require concise, logical judgment about the historical forces and situations at play for an American leadership interested in pursuit a policy of liberty and justice for all. There are threads of isolationism running beside threads of those looking for excuses to plunder foreign natural resources or to enrich the military-industrial complex through intervention. Perhaps we brilliantly supported Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation only because we were anti-Soviet. We learned from the Vietnam intervention of the costs of failing to take the preferred alternative of working with potential allies such as Ho Chi Minh when the opportunity arises because of prior commitments to colonial policies of historical allies (the French). The Kurds were promised a nation that would arise during the settlement of W.W. I and were cheated and deleted by the allied victors. Arming the Kurdish National Guard with weapons sufficient to defend themselves, Azidis and Christians from Caliphate invaders would seem the minimal appropriate response now.

One might wish that Kurdish pilots had already been trained to fly A-10 warthog anti-tank jets and given A-10s being phased out of U.S. Air Force service-perhaps a dozen, in order to attack armor the Caliphate has plundered from U.S. stocks given to the Iraqi military that lost them in being routed by the Caliphate. The Iraq government should benefit from a strong Kurdish regional national guard with its own air guard sufficient to make adequate air-to-ground attacks on irregular invading elements. One would expect that a few hundred hummers with anti-tank missiles and .50 caliber machine guns would de delivered in a few days. Yet the U.S. administration and state department may have a theoretical paradigm about the structure of the Iraq government and political dynamics formed from a faulty Platonic realist notion of the ideal state with hypothetical boundaries and composition to which political policies in D.C. must cohere. The persisting ideas about the western concept of a Platonic national state don’t necessarily coincide with the social-religious paradigmata of Muslims of the two rivers and hence might be maladaptive and reactionary.

Iraq is already polarized politically and it is likely that numerous former Iraq Bathist Party member officers have migrated to the Caliphate military having been purged by Mr. Bremmer’s policy of deBathification. President Maliki though brave has been polarizing and divisive losing tremendous amounts of military material to the caliphate. Continuing sectarian terror strife has persisted through his tenure, and he refuses to leave though he appears closer to being moved out of office.

Kurds have already experienced chemical weapons attacks by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq government and may have concerns about future Baghdad leadership attitudes toward Kurdistan as part of Iraq or as an affiliated nation. A strong Kurdish national guard would probably help to stabilize Iraq and allow a more independent role in Shi’a-Sunni government coalition formation that would at any rate likely require a substantial amount of time to form. So much time would pass-perhaps a year, before any degree of reconciliation would occur substantive enough to work slowly to draw Sunnis away from Caliphate sentiment and back toward national Iraq unity as a secular state, that it would have an inadequate effect at combating present Caliphate expansionism and terrorism. That delay might make the coefficient of adversity to roll back the Caliphate higher.

Certainly the dangers of wasting trillions of dollars of public spending in military engagements that are later lost through complete political incompetence is significant. Yet complete disengagement and isolation-something Americans give up eventually when mass murders and human rights destruction increases to a certain level, is not a preferred alternative for foreign policy to take. The Bush-Obama doctrine of reconstruction-deconstruction of the Iraq state has left things so f’d up that it is hard to go wrong arming the Kurds with some trick gizos-it already all f’d up.

Political bi-polarizism on intervention doesn’t work as well as rational moderation intervening here and there in appropriate levels. Political competence is required for some judicious military support and intervention even of personnel, and that is a rare commodity in the White House since Reagan-Bush.