Can world survive Islam.

You're the man!!! Oliver, if I ever said anything negative about you, I am taking it back right now. I support your ideas. Let's just hope that NATO will finally grow some balls and show the world what they can do. But before, they need to have some serious meeting to reassess their rules of engagement. For right now they are kept on the short lish: there has to be lots of conditions satisfy before they fire any shot. Till that is changed, they are useless.

They are not impossible to identify at all. Our trups are highly specialized. Worse problem was fighting insurgents in Iraq. Now they have theritory, and yes, they are uniformed.

I don't care what you say about me. And NATO knows better than you do how to deal with the enemy. Don't second guess the professionals.

The problem with my program is of course the risks of Vietnamisation / Iraqisation of the engagement. That is why local allies are essential. The French could not win in Mali without the Chadians and Malians.

I'm not disagreeing that NATO is quite capable. I'm only skeptical about this ever happening. Your program is absolutely fine and Iraqis showed in the pass they can be very effective in cooperation with our forces. The problem of the moment is that NATO is not making plans for any future operations, Obama will ocupy the white house another 1.5 year, there's no one right nowp who would make something happen, and in the meantime terrible atrocities are happening, and that's only beginning. According to what ISIS promising, they will come to our backyard, and there is no reason not to believe them.

ISIS is on the defensive now, having lost Tikrit to a hotchpotch coalition of Baghdad-based shia militias, Tikriti sunni tribes, Iraqi regular army and Iranian 'advisors'. The void left by the US is being filled by Iran, as I said it would, months back. Now the US cannot put boots on the ground because they would have to work with the Iranians. The only NATO nation that could realistically do much is Turkey. They can blow ISIS to pieces if they want to, at least in Northern Iraq. So far they think it's too risky to get involve, and they would be the first victim if ISIS grew beyond control, à la Hitler. The Turks distrust the Kurds and can't talk to Syrian strongman Assad, so they won't ally with them against ISIS. So they keep watching, and control the border however they can...

This could end either way. A victory of local forces is possible and would have huge benefits. Political and military. Imagine NATO forces taking ISIS dudes prisoners... What next? Rules of engagement, etc. Back to Abu Ghaib prison where ISIS started 10 years ago?... Now imagine shia and kurd militias beating up ISIS. Most ISIS pigs could end up in front of a Iraqi firing squad.

I don't know about you but I'd find that a much more satisfying end game... Inch Allah, as they say.

As an aside, the Iranians were very careful not to appear as leaders in the Tikrit battle. They don't want to project an image of foreign invaders so they play it low key. Obama speaks of 'leading from behind' which is the same thing. The French in Mali, while doing most of the work, have made much hay of their collaboration with regular Malian forces, other African forces, and even with Touareg rebel groups. This is classic really. Pimping up one's own achievements is not the strategic thing to do when you intervene in a country that's not your own...

Good analysis. This is getting more and more complicated every day.
It looks like by the time new president will be sworn, he (or she) will have hands-full. Now we are learning there is ISIS here in the country. New reports are coming, that ISIS fighters are learning Spanish to be treated as if they would be from South America when coming illegally through the southern border. What is that all about???

That's just a scare spread by the US extreme right. To use such things to make political hay is despicable, and it plays into the hands of the terrorists. They want to terrorize you, so why would you help them by spreading fear?

Obama inherited a total mess from W. He did not do very well in Iraq but that mess was created by Bush.

Well, everybody voted unanimously for going to Afghanistan and to Iraq, on both sides of the ally, so I wouldn't rush the judgment blaming just one person. In my opinion the problem was not starting that war, because lots of evil was eliminated after all, but the way the end of that war was mishandled, actually by present administration. We NEVER should leave Iraq unchecked. That would be equivalent of performing surgery on 3rd stage cancer patient without follow up with chemo or any kind of antyinfection meds. OF COURSE the cancer WILL come back, and it did, with the vangeance. Blaming Busch... neah, that's easy, since he's no longer president, so everyone is bitting on him. I think it's time for Obama to finally take some responsibility.
I could never understand how everyone, including some republicans, were talking about not finding WMD, going to Iraq for the wrong reasons, Cia gave wrong intel, etc. And I'm sitting here listening to all this BS thinking, did everybody completely lost their minds??? Didn't Sadam Hussein killed about 150,000 people using WMD? And, unless the videos were lying, our military find the factory of those weapons, also showing how they were destroying all the stockpiles of chemical weapory, plus satellite pics of trucks leaving Iraq, going to Syria, carrying WMD's to hide them over there. I just can't get it, why stupid republicans took the blame instead of defending the cause by proven facts.
This is mystery to me. Besides who the hell needs any prove if Sadam Hussein himself already proved it by killing all those people!?

Whatever. Going to war with Saddam was a very very bad idea in the first place, which led to ISIS rising. Now there is very little the US can do to fix the mess they created. The Iranians are filling the vacuum, and better them than nobody, the way I see it. At least the Iranians seem to care, they are in this part of the world forever, and they think hard before they act rather than shoot from the hip like the US so often does.

I agree with you to some extend on this one. Iranians care more than we do perhaps because they want to beat the ISIS to the punch and Islamize the world. As weird as it sounds it makes a lot of sense, as if two predators fighting over their prey. As to the Iraq war being bad or good idea, I listen to lots of opinions but it is extremely difficult to tell who's right and who's wrong, simply because we don't know and no one does, what would happen if we didn't go there. We can only speculate. We can't escape certain facts, whether they are relevant or not. One of them is, that Sadam Hussein, the monster that he was, he was not Islamic extremist fanatic trying to impose Sharia law, on rest of the world, online Isis is. In fact the foreign minister working for Sadam, Azis, was christian, strangely enough. We don't know how history will see the Iraq war a hundred years from now. It depends who will write the history I suppose. One think we CAN say today, is that while we can argue about if starting that war was justifiable, the way we ended it was definitely not.

Indeed, allowing massive looting, disbanding the armed forces, torturing people... Odd ways to free a country.