Iraq and ISIS Discussion

Meant, if they (govt) ignore the issue (ISIS / Syria / JN / Islamic State / Shia Iraqi govt taking revenge on Sunnis....etc) they hope the problem just goes away, until it's too late of course and it's a real issue.

(Democrats majority in the Senate....I do hope that goes away too!)
 
I'm pretty sick of seeing the POTUS blame us in the Intelligence Community for underestimating ISIL... WTF?

Bureaucratic and political bullshit, not a failure in intel. I'm thinking this guy wasn't paying attention while at the clubhouse working on his handicap.
 
Speaking of which...

Obama has had accurate intelligence about ISIS since BEFORE the 2012 election, says administration insider
  • A national security staffer in the Obama administration said the president has been seeing 'highly accurate predictions' about the rise of the ISIS terror army since 'before the 2012 election'
  • Obama insisted in his campaign speeches that year that America was safe and al-Qaeda was 'on the run'
  • The president said during Sunday's '60 Minutes' program that his Director of National Intelligence had conceded he underestimated ISIS
  • But the administration aide insisted that Obama's advisers gave him actionable information that sat and gathered dust for more than a year
  • 'He knew what was at stake,' the aide said of the president, and 'he knew where all the moving pieces were'
  • Obama takes daily intelligence briefings in writing, he explained, because no one will be able to testify about warning the president in person about threats that the White House doesn't act on
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...012-election-says-administration-insider.html
 
Florida173 said:
I'm pretty sick of seeing the POTUS blame us in the Intelligence Community for underestimating ISIL... WTF?

Bureaucratic and political bullshit, not a failure in intel. I'm thinking this guy wasn't paying attention while at the clubhouse working on his handicap.
Click to expand...

I think the distinguished gentleman from South Carolina said it best in September 2009 during the State of The Union address.
 
Let's say for a second the President is right, let's say the IC completely blew this ISIL thing.

Why aren't we nuking it from orbit? The IC? CIA, NSA, DIA, UPS....whoever the hell is involved. If our intelligence community is so freaking broken then why keep them around? Everybody and their brother, right or wrong, blames their situation on the intelligence community's inability to do its job, but we keep those same people and organizations around? With no major changes? Out of all of the spying drama in the last few years and they supposedly miss the entire ISIL/ Iraq/ Syria saga, but no one's burning those places to the ground?

Either someone's full of shit or we are complete morons.
 
On a serious note, I would be willing to bet that like every other major decision the POTUS has had to make he was just indecisive. I always had aspersions to be President, and even though I disagree 95% of the time with President Obama, I give him credit for wanting to do it for one term, let alone two, because as I get older and wiser that job looks less appealing by the day.
 
Directors of CIA and DIA both testified in the House in 2013 that ISIL was no shit and ISF wasn't capable to stop them.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/29/obama-knew-months-intel-concerns-islamic-state/

“For over a year, U.S. intelligence agencies specifically warned that ISIL was taking advantage of the situation in Syria to recruit members and provoke violence that could spill into Iraq and the rest of the region,” Mr. Rogers said. “In fact, in 2013, the House Intelligence Committee formally pressed the administration for action to address the terrorist threat present in Syria. Additionally, national security experts – both inside and outside the government – repeatedly warned, a year before ISIL’s drive into Mosul, that the Iraq Security Forces faced severe pressure; the House Intelligence Committee held a hearing on that very issue in early 2014.

“And we all knew that former Iraqi Prime Minster Maliki had mismanaged his military and gutted the ISF of its top commanders. Indeed, over a year ago, our Arab League partners sought U.S. support and leadership for a coordinated effort to address the extremist threat in eastern Syria. This was not an Intelligence Community failure, but a failure by policy makers to confront the threat.”

Other intelligence officials pointed to testimony in February by Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the then-Defense Intelligence Agency director, who specifically warned that the Islamic State was poised to “take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014.”

A week earlier before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, CIA Director John O. Brennan told lawmakers that he and others in the intelligence community were concerned not only that al Qaeda was using Syria to recruit foreign fighters to “carry out attacks inside Syria, but also to use Syria as a launching pad.”

“There are camps inside of both Iraq and Syria that are used by al Qaeda to develop capabilities that are applicable both in the theater, as well as beyond,” Mr. Brennan said at the time.
 
The IC is the administration's full-time "fall guy."

When they do something good, the administration takes the credit that should be due the IC community.

When something goes wrong, the administration blames them.

Some administrations do so more than others.
 
I hate to say it but I think that @lindy pretty much called this back in August of 2013

pardus said:
I cant immediately think of any scenario that would directly affect us with Syria.
Click to expand...
lindy said:
Exact same scenario that played out in Afghanistan in the late 70's & 80's is occurring NOW in Syria except the fighters are already anti-West, have support network, and are very experienced.
Click to expand...

The administration definitely dropped the ball on this one. If the IC was making these assessments as far back as Spring 2013, then that's quite a bit of advance warning. Still, I have to wonder how the political atmosphere at the time influenced their decision-making. Unfortunately I don't have any direct quotes to support this, but I remember Congress (and America in general) leaning further towards the "Let's not do anything about Syria" camp until around August (when the big gas attack happened). Even then it seemed like there was a sharp divide between the intervention and non-intervention camps. We even had a 32-page thread on it.

Nobody in the public sphere was talking about IS back in 2013 so it would've been impossible to speculate about that specific threat (beyond something like "What if this spills over into Iraq/becomes a new Mujahidin" as @lindy alluded to), but with the charged political climate during the summer and fall of 2013, I'm not sure I would've made a big push to take action either. I'll try to dig up some threads around when the news started reporting on IS and see what people were saying back then. It should make for an interesting comparison.

EDIT: Actually, it seems like this is the most consistently posted-in thread on the topic from earlier this year.
 
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...lotters-in-syria-went-dark-u-s-spies-say.html

Hmm.....

U.S. intelligence agencies learned this summer of a plot from al Qaeda veterans in Syria to attack European and American airplanes. Then the Khorasan Group went dark.
Over the summer, as ISIS fighters were winning swaths of territory in Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies were also focused on the group’s ostensible jihadist rivals in neighboring Syria.

American analysts had pieced together detailed information on a pending attack from an outfit that informally called itself “the Khorasan Group” to use hard-to-detect explosives on American and European airliners.

As the Khorasan Group came closer to executing the attack, however, U.S. intelligence agencies lost track of the plotters. “We had some information on their plans that did not pan out over the summer,” one senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast. “They shut it down and went dark.”

Since 2012, the U.S. intelligence community has tracked the movement of several senior al Qaeda planners into Syria, where they have set up operations aimed not at Bashar al-Assad’s regime, like many of their fellow militants. Instead, these planners were focused on Europe and America. At first, the group was believed by U.S. intelligence agencies to be al Qaeda’s senior operatives and linked to al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria known as al-Nusra. But beginning in the spring, the intelligence community began to call the outfit “the Khorasan Group,” named in part because many of its members are affiliated with the Khorasan Shura, a leadership council within al Qaeda. Khorasan in Jihadist literature refers to the region that includes Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.

“My suspicion is what we are hearing about Khorasan is only part of the group,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, an expert on al Qaeda at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “It strikes me as quite possible we are only hearing about the external operations wing and not the entire organization.”

Last week Director of National Intelligence James Clapper became the first senior government official to publicly name the Khorasan Group at an intelligence conference in Washington. The Associated Press published the first major story on the organization on September 13. On Tuesday, U.S. military leaders and President Obama himself publicly named the Khorasan Group as one of the targets of the airstrikes Monday evening and Tuesday morning inside Syria.

Jihadist media claimed two of the group’s leaders, Muhsin al-Fadhli and Abu Yousef al-Turki, were killed in the attack. A Pentagon spokesman said he could not confirm those reports.

The attack on the Khorasan Group, which consists of senior al Qaeda operatives loyal to the group’s central leadership, presents an unusual dilemma for Obama’s own war planners. Currently al Qaeda’s official franchise in Syria, al-Nusra, is fighting with ISIS, the breakaway Jihadist group whose positions were bombed in Raqqa, Syria, in the same flurry of U.S. airstrikes Monday night and Tuesday morning.

Perhaps striking two sides in Syria’s four-sided (or more) civil war will strengthen America’s new allies, the moderate rebels in the long run. (In the short term, it may not mean much.) But the attacks could also weaken the most potent opponents to the dictator Bashar al-Assad. Or, perhaps worse still, the U.S. strikes could drive ISIS and al Qaeda back together, creating a jihadist Frankenstein.

U.S. intelligence officials have privately and publicly described al Qaeda’s relationship with ISIS as a competitive one, with both groups staking claim to the leadership of the global jihadist movement. “It’s no secret al Qaeda is in a huge competition with the Islamic State,” Gartenstein-Ross said, noting that a spectacular terrorist attack on a Western target is one way for al Qaeda to make inroads against ISIS. "What’s been going on is al Qaeda exercising a strategy to compete with them. And it seems like the Khorasan Group is a part of that.”

“It’s no secret al Qaeda is in a huge competition with ISIS.” A spectacular terrorist attack on a Western target is one way for al Qaeda to make inroads.
U.S. officials confirm to The Daily Beast that over the summer, the U.S. intelligence community began closely tracking a plot to sneak non-metallic bombs inside European and American airliners. On Tuesday, Army Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr., director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Khorasan Group was in the execution phase of a plot against the West.

An attack involving multiple airliners is much more sophisticated and deadly than what U.S. counter-terrorism analysts believe ISIS is capable of launching inside the United States. For now, ISIS’s strength is in seizing territory in the Middle East, not in attacking Middle America. The threat from ISIS is largely based on its ability to inspire and radicalize Westerners to launch fairly simple attacks inside Europe and America similar to the bombing at the Boston Marathon in 2013. The planning from the Khorasan Group, though, suggests at least an aspiration to launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.

The Khorasan Group has been experimenting with different types of non-metallic explosives for attacks on Western targets, according to U.S. intelligence officials. Most of the members of the group come from Yemen, Afghanistan, or Pakistan and have for months been coordinating with bomb-makers drawn from al Qaeda’s affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula, the most persistent and creative of al Qaeda groups in efforts to bomb U.S.-bound passenger jets.

ISIS and al Qaeda bitterly split earlier this year, and have since attacked one another on occasions. But some analysts now fear that striking at ISIS and al Qaeda could persuade the two groups to put aside their sharp differences and come together. Indeed, jihadist ideologues loyal to both warring factions have had similar messages for their followers in the wake of the airstrikes.

For example, prominent ISIS supporter Shaibat Al-Hamad called on jihadists in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to kill any Westerners in their countries, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, a U.S.-based nonprofit that tracks online jihadi activity. That’s a move more reminiscent of al Qaeda than of ISIS.

The influential jihadist ideologue Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi, who has in the past denounced ISIS as deviant and has urged the group to release British hostage Alan Henning because aid workers shouldn’t be harmed, has told his supporters that “Muslims must not support Crusader aggression against” ISIS.

An easing of tensions between al Qaeda and ISIS presents dangers for America in its military campaign in the Levant. It could persuade hardline Islamist brigades, the largest of the insurgent militias among the Syrian rebels, to oppose the West and to halt their own war against ISIS. “There is a major risk here,” says a European intelligence source. “Al-Nusra has lot of influence among the Islamists—they have been allies together not only when it comes to fighting Assad but also in battling ISIS. If al-Nusra forms an alliance with ISIS, some of them will too.”

The attacks on the Khorasan Group also complicate U.S. efforts to partner with the more moderate opposition. One Syrian rebel group supported in the past by the United States condemned the airstrikes on Tuesday. Harakat Hazm, a rebel group that received a shipment of U.S. anti-tank weapons in the spring, called the airstrikes “an attack on national sovereignty” and charged that foreign-led attacks only strengthen the Assad regime. The statement comes from a document, purportedly from the group, that has circulated online and was posted in English translation from a Twitter account called Syria Conflict Monitor. Several Syria experts, including the Brookings Doha Center’s Charles Lister, believe the document to be authentic.

Before the official statement, there were signs that Harakat Hazm was making alliances in Syria that could conflict with its role as a U.S. partner. In early Septemeber a Harakat Hazm official told a reporter for the L.A. Times: “Inside Syria, we became labeled as secularists and feared Nusra Front was going to battle us…But Nusra doesn't fight us, we actually fight alongside them. We like Nusra.”
Click to expand...
 
http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-kurdish-homemade-tanks-may-look-funny-but-theyre-no-1640442470

t7zb66zduetq2p6zndnj.jpg


There's been a lot of attention on the internet recently to the funny-looking home-made tanks Kurdish forces have been building to help with their fight against ISIS, or ISIL, or whatever we call that pack of assholes. Most of that attention has been, frankly, ridicule. I'm not so sure that ridicule is warranted here.

It's not like I can't understand the urge to ridicule here — the tanks are pretty funny-looking. Some are almost like cute cartoon versions of tanks, with chubby proportions and many obviously hand-made looking details. But I don't think we can judge these based on what we know about modern tanks or Armored Personnel Carriers, or assume that the people who've been building these things even think of them as substitutes for actual tanks.

kmsdw5tgsmyrs71l2ycl.jpg


I think if you assume that these are built with the naive idea that they're going to work as well as conventional, factory-built tanks, of course they seem absurd, and most of the harshest criticism seems to be making this assumption.

But that's not the case. As others have pointed out, these are armored vehicles, not tanks, and they're used with extensive infantry support. These tanks aren't expected to deal with anti-tank weapons or rocket-propelled grenades. They could be very effective against small arms fire, shrapnel from mortar and rocket fire, both of which are a huge deal during the conflict. They provide a relatively safe and mobile location for soldiers in such small arms battles, and I know I sure as hell would rather have one of these than nothing.

They're also used as ambulances to provided protected transport of soldiers out of harm's way, and it's easy to see how any sort of armor would be appreciated in such a role.


Engineering-wise, they're not sneeze-targets, either. Most are built on truck or construction-equipment chassis, and while their armor isn't amazing, they're still pretty impressive work when you consider the makeshift and desperate conditions they're built in.

Sure, they may not be able to take a HEAT round directly, but how many US lightly armored vehicles can? If we're going to criticize these things, let's at least try and be realistic about what they are.

From the looks of things, they're being remarkably creative with this stuff. I'm not 100% certain, but I think some of these are using repurposed dumpsters for body panels. Sure, some of the camo looks like the pattern you'd find on a '70s bathmat, but I'm a fan of the massive animal faces they're painting on some of these things. Why the hell not?

pbshtoga2zjtpl69fkhm.jpg


So far, the Kurds have been pretty much on their own in the fight against ISIS, and I don't think their improvised armor is "terrible" at all. I'm seeing a lot of clever and innovative solutions to some very serious problems, all executed in what must be some of the shittiest conditions imaginable.

And, I don't agree with the claims that these are a drain of resources. I think that constructing these vehicles gives tangible, visible examples of their struggle, and even if they weren't that great on the battlefield, their very existence helps give a morale boost to their people. We've seen this sort of pride in home-made arms before.


Meet The Hell Cannon, The Free Syrian Army's Homemade Howitzer
In a place where heavy weaponry is scarce, yet war against a fairly well armed government has raged …Read more

So, sure, these DIY armored vehicles look like they've lumbered out of a cartoon about WWI drawn by a kid who was raised on a diet of printed-out Etsy pages, but that doesn't matter. These vehicles have utility far beyond their awkward looks, and it's worth remembering that before dismissing them all in one big swipe of a hand that's thankfully nowhere near this shit.
Click to expand...
 
Kraut783 said:
I think more of a....they chose not to take the USIC information on the issue. Ignore it and it goes away........right? :wall:
Click to expand...

Yeah, POTUS had been reluctant all along to get involved in the Syrian affair. Neither he nor his advisors would welcome any intel that might suggest a threat too serious to ignore. The policy, even during the Syrian chemical weapons controversy, was lead from behind...and at most, if it couldn't be quelled diplomatically, launch a few Tomahawks.
 
Ocoka One said:
Yeah, POTUS had been reluctant all along to get involved in the Syrian affair. Neither he nor his advisors would welcome any intel that might suggest a threat too serious to ignore. The policy, even during the Syrian chemical weapons controversy, was lead from behind...and at most, if it couldn't be quelled diplomatically, launch a few Tomahawks.
Click to expand...

The bold face part; it worked for Clinton.
 

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