More recently, Trump and Graham have battled over foreign policy after Graham tweeted that the administration’s decision not to retaliate militarily to Iran’s downing of an American drone “was clearly seen by the Iranian regime as a sign of weakness.”
Trump bristled, insisting, “No Lindsey, it was a sign of strength that some people just don’t understand!”
He later mocked Graham’s support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, asking reporters “how did going into Iraq work out?”
Trump’s call for ending U.S. military involvement in the Middle East and bringing the troops home was a feature of his presidential campaign, but it flies in the face of many decades of bipartisan American policy, even as the Trump administration and its immediate predecessor have tried to give additional attention to what they see as long-term security threats elsewhere, including from China and Russia.
Trump suggested that Republican predecessor George W. Bush, whose military invaded Iraq based on bad intelligence, was responsible for entangling the United States in a regional quagmire that has resulted in more 50,000 American casualties since 2001.
‚We went to war under a false & now disproven premise, WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. There were NONE! Now we are slowly & carefully bringing our great soldiers & military home. Our focus is on the BIG PICTURE! THE USA IS GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE!‘ he proclaimed.
Trump said that religious clashes in the Middle East will never be resolved by an American military presence.
(14.09.2019)
It requires more than bringing ground troops home from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe. Dominance, assumed to ensure peace, in fact guarantees war. To get serious about stopping endless war, American leaders must do what they most resist: end America’s commitment to armed supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace.
A government spokesperson told FRANCE 24 that a probe into the killings is under way. But so far, authorities say they have no idea who is behind them.
Click on the player above to watch the report by Simona Foltyn and Lucile Wassermann.
Furthermore, Turkish authorities do often question the motives of the continued military support of the U.S. to the YPG although the war against ISIL has already been won. Many in Ankara recall the establishment of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq in the 1990s and express concerns that this trend in Syria may lead to the disintegration of its southern neighbor.
The governor of the Iraqi capital province of Baghdad, Fallah al-Jazairi, has stepped down in the wake of demonstrations against corruption, unemployment and poor public services in the country.
On Sunday, members of the Provincial Council voted in favor of accepting Jazairi’s resignation, and he quit his post.
A number of protesters and security personnel have been killed as a result of the provocations.
On Friday, Iraqi police said in a statement that “unidentified snipers” killed two security forces and two civilians across the capital Baghdad earlier in the day.
Arab media outlets and observes have published reports revealing that the US seeks to drive recent anti-corruption protests in Iraq into chaos in a bid to install a pro-US regime.
(04.10.2019)
„There have been unacceptable and condemned attacks on demonstrators, policemen and properties in Baghdad along with a number of provinces,“ al-Sistani said in a statement.
„In different areas, the demonstrations have led to riots and bloody clashes that left dozens of victims and wounded,“ he added.
Sistani warned of the „serious repercussions of the use of violence and counter-violence,“ calling for „avoiding it in all cases“.
Meanwhile, the correspondent for the Iran-based Arabic-language al-Alam television news network, Navid Behrouz, reported that the captured terrorists had planned to incite protesters to storm Ayatollah Sistani’s office.
Earlier in the day, Grand Ayatollah Sistani urged Iraqi security forces and protesters to avoid violence, expressing sorrow over some sporadic unrest that has led to several casualties.
“It is sorrowful there have been so many deaths, casualties and destruction” from clashes between anti-government protesters and security forces in recent days, he said in a letter on Friday.
(30.09.2019)
BEIRUT — Syria and Iraq announced the reopening of a border crossing between the two countries Monday, a step toward the normalization of Iraq’s relationship with its western neighbor and a boost to Iran, which will now have an open corridor into Syria.
(30.09.2019)
The crossing, which Iraqi officials declared open for travellers and trade, is crucial for Iran’s bid to cement its growing sway over a corridor of territory from Tehran to Beirut.
The opening of the crossing signified „the victory of the Iraqi and Syrian people over all terrorist groups, especially Daesh,“ said Syrian Interior Minister Mohammad Khaled al-Rahmoun, using a term for Islamic State.
(03.10.2019)
(25. Dezember 1992)
Mr. Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 5 on charges that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and efforts by other countries to help underwrite the Nicaraguan rebels, a case that was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger’s private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush’s endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran.
(14.01.2019)
Barr, who is scheduled to go before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday for his confirmation hearings, ran the Justice Department once before, under President George H.W. Bush.
Back then, the all-consuming, years-long scandal was called Iran-Contra. On Dec. 24, 1992, it ended when Bush pardoned six people who had been caught up in it.
„The Constitution is quite clear on the powers of the president and sometimes the president has to make a very difficult call,“ Bush said then. „That’s what I’ve done.“
A senior Iranian pilgrimage official told state television that the Khosravi border crossing was closed, but other crossings were open ahead of the pilgrimage in the southern Iraqi city of Kerbala.
“The government is preparing sufficient evidence and documents to complain to the [UN] Security Council. It won’t submit a complaint against an unknown entity,” Assadi said.
Iraq reopened its Qaim border-crossing with Syria on Monday after eight years of closure amid regional turmoil, in the latest sign of normalization between Baghdad and Damascus and a win for their mutual ally Iran.
(25.9.19) Riyadh opened a consulate in Baghdad in April 2019 and pledging $1.5 billion in loans to Iraq during the trip. The Arar border crossing between the two countries is set to reopen next month after nearly three decades of closure.
Acting on intelligence tip-off, a joint force from Salahudin’s Operations Command, backed by Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition aircraft, conducted an operation to hunt down IS militants in a desert area in west of the provincial capital Tikrit, said a statement by the media office of the Joint Operations Command (JOC).
The 56-year-old general, who in recent years led the fight against the Islamic State group working alongside the U.S.-led coalition, said he did not know the reason for the proposed transfer and would prefer to retire rather than be moved to the defense ministry.
For decades now, the evolving role of congressional oversight of US intelligence has involved major clashes and scandals, from the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s to the intelligence abuses that led to the 2003 war in Iraq.
Central to all of these clashes are attempts by intelligence agencies, the president and the executive branch to withhold damning information from Congress. Another common element is the use of civilians to carry out presidential or intelligence agency agendas.
On the Syrian side it connects with the Al Bukamal border crossing point in the Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor and is controlled from the Syrian side of the border.
There are currently three crossings at the Iraqi-Syrian border: Rabia, also referred to as Al-Yarubiyah, located in Syria’s Al Hasakah province controlled by Kurdish-led forces and the At Tanf crossing located in an area controlled by US forces in Syria.
(2003) Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?
Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.
He contradicted a statement in President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address. A week later, his wife at the time, Valerie Plame, was outed as a C.I.A. agent.
Chirac was barely a year into his second presidential term when he was faced with the biggest diplomatic challenge of his career as then US president George W. Bush attempted to build a “coalition of the willing” against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.
The French leader was resolutely unwilling to join the coalition, emerging as a formidable voice of opposition against a military invasion. His Gallic “non” frayed France’s relations with the US and Britain, but it also won him legions of admirers at home and abroad.
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) – The United States wants to build a coalition of European and Arab partners to deter Iran after an attack on Saudi Arabia that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described on Wednesday as „an act of war“ against the world’s top oil exporter.
Gun believes that because there was no specific UN authority to attack Iraq, ‘in theory’ Bush and Blair could be put on trial for waging an aggressive war (the charge at Nuremberg). ‘That is the only consolation I have… A lot of people would welcome that. It would show that there isn’t a double standard. It would show that when our politicians break the law they are held accountable.’ There is no chance of such a war crimes trial. Gun, the conscience–stricken spy, will almost certainly remain the only British official charged with anything to do with the war in Iraq.
(26.4.2018)
As Barbara Lee presciently warned her colleagues before she cast her lone dissenting vote in 2001, we have “become the evil we deplore.” But these wars have not been accompanied by fearsome military parades (not yet) or speeches about conquering the world. Instead they have been politically justified by “information warfare” to demonize enemies and fabricate crises, and then waged in a “disguised, quiet, media free” way, to hide their cost in human blood from the American public and the world.
After 16 years of war, about 6 million violent deaths, 6 countries utterly destroyed and many more destabilized, it is urgent that the American public come to terms with the true human cost of our country’s wars and how we have been manipulated and misled into turning a blind eye to them – before they go on even longer, destroy more countries, further undermine the rule of international law and kill millions more of our fellow human beings.
(17.1.2014)
Written in the frenzied, emotional days after 9/11, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force was intended to give President Bush the ability to retaliate against whoever orchestrated the attacks. But more than 12 years later, this sentence remains the primary legal justification for nearly every covert operation around the world. Here’s how it came to be, and what it’s since come to mean.
As Biden acknowledged this week, the plan to divide Iraq along ethnic lines he cooked up with Gelb was criticized at the time as more likely to incite than tamp down sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing, as it had early in the war in Bosnia and following the partitioning of Ireland, India, and Palestine in the last century. In each of those prior cases, partition, which looked good on paper and was accepted enthusiastically by extreme nationalist/segregationist leaders in each place, had the same result in practice: It encouraged violent sectarian cleansing and the destruction of the multiethnic societies that had existed in those territories for centuries.
„Nine months ago, I voted with my colleagues to give the president of the United States of America the authority to use force and I would vote that way again today. It was the right vote then and would be a correct vote today,“ Biden said in a July 2003 speech at the Brookings Institution.
Of the 20 Democrats still running for president in 2020, only two — Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — were in a position to vote on authorizing President George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq back in 2002.
(04.09.2019)
This version of events is so twisted that the very next sentence of the NPR story starts debunking the idea that Biden was antiwar. But it’s worth unpacking more fully. Let’s start from the beginning and work our way through:
Hillary Clinton engaged in the same kind of historical revisionism. She was a reliable hawk on military interventions, including the disastrous intervention in Libya, without even a resolution; regarding Iraq, she jumped on the popular bandwagon for war. When it became less popular, however, she claimed to have been misled, even though she and her colleagues ignored those of us opposing the original war resolution.
The Khosravi border crossing was reopened on Friday during a ceremony attended by Iran’s Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli and his Iraqi counterpart Yassin al-Yassri.
On March 1, the U.K. Observer threw a grenade into this extraordinarily fraught situation: a leaked January 31 email from a National Security Agency manager. The NSA manager was demanding a full court espionage press on the members of the Security Council — “minus US and GBR of course,” the manager jocularly said — as well as non-Security Council countries who might be producing useful chatter.
Two-time Oscar nominee Keira Knightley is known for being in “period pieces” such as “Pride and Prejudice,” so her playing the lead in the new film “Official Secrets,” scheduled to be released in the U.S. on Friday, may seem odd at first. That is until one considers that the time span being depicted — the early 2003 run-up to the invasion of Iraq — is one of the most dramatic and consequential periods of modern human history.
Yet Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds have announced that Australia will contribute to the Trump-led mission in the Strait of Hormuz. Morrison says Australia will help ensure freedom of navigation in international waters and that we are acting in response to what he calls “destabilising behaviour” in the Gulf. Reynolds says our core concern is de-escalation.
Let’s be clear: the destabilising behaviour was in fact initiated by our ally, the US, and sending additional troops, planes and ships into an increasingly tense situation is not a move likely to de-escalate tensions.
The history of the invasion of Iraq should weigh heavily on the minds of Australians as we once again send troops into harm’s way in the Middle East.
Salih added that „Iraq attaches great importance to developing relations with China.“
He said that „Iraq is willing to continuously strengthen exchanges at all levels, deepen the strategic integration of each other’s development strategies, enhance strategic cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative and promote the new strategic partnership between Iraq and China,“ according to the statement.
The meeting discussed „the tension between neighboring Iran and the United States, and Iraq’s position toward this crisis is clear as it is based on calm and reduce the escalation by adopting efforts to resolve this crisis by peaceful means,“ Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed al-Hakim told a joint press conference with his Egyptian and Jordanian counterparts.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told reporters that his country „stands with peaceful solution and the reduction of escalation in the region.“
The Deputy Commander of the Joint Operations of Iraq, Special Forces Team, Abdel-Emir Rashid Yarallah, told the Sputnik News Agency in a statement on Monday that the Iraqi Armed Forces had begun the third phase of the operation, with the primary target being the Diyala countryside.
“We have thousands of Isis fighters that we want Europe to take and let’s see if they take them. And if they don’t take them, we’ll probably have to release them to Europe,” Mr Trump said on the White House lawn on Thursday.
The SDF is thought to be holding around 13,000 foreigners suspected of Isis links — not including Iraqi or Syrian fighters. That number is made up of 2,000 men and 11,000 women and children, most of whom were detained when the terror group’s caliphate fell earlier this year.
(19.07.2019)
The statement said the drone dropped two grenades half an hour apart on the base in Amirli, in Iraq’s northern Salaheddin province. No further details were provided.
(25.10.2016)
Qatar is a Sunni gas-powerhouse and wants to become the main supplier of gas there, and Saudi Arabia is a Sunni oil-powerhouse, which wants to become the major supplier of oil, but Saudi oil and Qatari gas would be pipelined through secular-controlled (Assad’s) Syria, and this is why the U.S. and its fundamentalist-Sunni allies, the Sauds, and Qataris, are using Al Qaeda and other jihadists to conquer enough of a strip through Syria so that U.S. companies such as Halliburton will be able safely to place pipelines there, to be marketed in Europe by U.S. firms such as Exxon. Iran also wants to pipeline its gas through Syria, and this is one reason why Iran is defending Syria’s government, against the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-jihadist invasion, which is trying to overthrow and replace Assad.
(19.07.2019)
Assem Jihad, a spokesman for the Ministry of Oil, told Al-Monitor, “The ministry is considering the extension of an Iraqi oil pipeline through Syrian territory to the Mediterranean Sea, and is in the process of studying the economic feasibility of the project and the appropriate geographical and security conditions.”
He said the idea had been proposed in 2004 but delayed due to unstable security conditions in both countries.
(16.02.2018) There was at one time, a completely plausible plan for the region that has gone off the rails — not because any side opposed it — but because there was no oversight to bring the plan to fruition.
In between President Obama’s ‘Pivot to Asia’, the Arab Spring, and the U.S. elections that brought Donald Trump to the White House, the Syrian situation was left unguided and (no surprise!) it therefore deteriorated.
Major powers are now bombing each other’s troops and shooting down each other’s aircraft (and who knows what else is going on that isn’t reported) which makes escalation a foregone conclusion in the absence of leadership and implementation of the original plan.
A commander overseeing U.S. special operations troops battling the Islamic State in Iraq has ordered a SEAL platoon to return to San Diego …
(17.07.2019)
During a trilateral meeting between the national security advisers of Israel, the US and Russia in late June, Jerusalem and Washington demanded that Moscow ensure the withdrawal of Iran’s forces from Lebanon and Iraq, as well as from Syria, Channel 13 news reported Tuesday.
The demand was seen as a condition for US and Israeli support for a long-term arrangement to secure peace in war-ravaged Syria.