ISIS has taken most all of the Military equipment recently sent to Iraq by the U.S.
29 2014-07-01 by PKWinter
So it looks like the situation has escalated in a manner which is beyond what a person would generally conceive of as normal. Did this happen by any intention? Is it just that we're not good at training people?
10 comments
9 peeceypee 2014-07-01
new threat to worry about.
PLEASE INCREASE DEFENSE SPENDING FOR OUR SAFETY
3 sheasie 2014-07-01
hahahahaha - good one! ;)
4 sheasie 2014-07-01
mission accomplished™
3 Ambiguously_Ironic 2014-07-01
"taken"... lol
"been given" is more like it.
2 AMexicanAbroad 2014-07-01
Who wants to bet that they have the know-how to use it fully?
2 Biztowner 2014-07-01
And most of what we've sold to Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. It's just a front for the Sunni monarchies to wage war against Iran.
1 beatvox 2014-07-01
Archer!
1 [deleted] 2014-07-01
uncanny how they knew where to find it all
0 exoriare 2014-07-01
In any professional army, you transfer people around a lot. This isn't for their benefit, it's to ensure that they don't develop local allegiances that are stronger than their allegiance to the state. When you fail to do this (Tienanmen Square, Moscow 1991), the local army often refuses to fight the citizens that they live with. When this happens, you have to bring in some outside units.
Iraq doesn't have a professional military. In Sunni areas, the army units are Sunni. In Kurdish areas, the army is Kurdish. In Shiite areas, the army is Shiite.
The Sunnis have largely been excluded from government, so when the Sunni ISIL force hit, the loyalty of the army was minimal - why would they want to fight fellow Sunni to defend a Shiite government? They walked away from this fight, so a lot of their kit was captured. Now, the government wants to bring in largely Shiite units to fight them. They might win the battle, but it's still sectarian conflict, which is a losing game for a modern nation-state to get involved in.
Now, if the Sunni military units were positioned against Iran, that would be a whole different ballgame. They'd be much more willing to fight. If Iraq is going to survive as a state, this is probably what they'll have to do: bring in Shiites to defend against Sunni, and bring in Sunni to defend against Shiite. It is certainly a difficult hand to play.
1 PKWinter 2014-07-01
It seems to me that enforcing that people don't develop feelings towards the people they are around should be less important than it is, but that explanation is concise.
I suppose this way of handling it, getting the two factions to fight each other for the unknown benefit of themselves seems like a good enough reason to leave the concept to being unknown to them, but like always it seems that the Americans' concept of social matters that don't result in a commercialism based society are just automatically less valuable.
It seems to me that trying to get people to fight their friends for money seems like a foolish view, and one that someone could have seen coming. The nearly automatic reaction to feeding these people military equipment by happenstance or not seems to be American involvement; I'm not sure who couldn't have guessed at this intention of many people who have the ability. :(