Category Archives: DOJ, DC and inside the Beltway

Obama out of Iraq Due to WH, Maliki, Mahdi Army

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The White House knew better than anyone else when it came to Iraq. At all costs, Barack Obama wanted out and to declare hostilities over. He prevailed however, today Iraq is a battleground not seen before.

In Mosul, two army divisions also disintegrated as thousands of soldiers and police officers shed their uniforms, dropped their weapons and ran for their lives. Shehab, told that his commanders had deserted, tossed his rifle and ran away too.

“We felt like cowards, but our commanders were afraid of Daesh. They were too afraid to lead us,” said Shehab, 43, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. The military collapsed in Mosul even though Washington spent eight years and $25 billion to train, arm and equip Iraq’s security forces. The United States has now deployed 1,400 advisors to try to rebuild the shattered military into a force that can repel Islamic State.

So how did Iraq reach this point?

Behind the U.S. Withdrawal From Iraq

Negotiations were repeatedly disrupted by Obama White House staffers’ inaccurate public statements

By James Franklin Jeffrey

 

The spectacular success in early 2014 of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq, is often blamed on the failure of the Obama administration to secure an American troop presence in Iraq beyond 2011. As the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in 2010-12, I believed that keeping troops there was critical. Nevertheless, our failure has roots far beyond the Obama administration.

The story begins in 2008, when the Bush administration and Iraq negotiated a Status of Forces Agreement granting U.S. troops in the country legal immunities—a sine qua non of U.S. basing everywhere—but with the caveat that they be withdrawn by the end of 2011.

By 2010 many key Americans and Iraqis thought that a U.S. military presence beyond 2011 was advisable, for security (training Iraqi forces, control of airspace, counterterrorism) and policy (continued U.S. engagement and reassurance to neighbors). The Pentagon began planning for a continued military presence, but an eight-month impasse on forming a new government after the March 2010 Iraqi elections delayed final approval in Washington.

In January 2011, once the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was formed, President Obama decided, with the concurrence of his advisers, to keep troops on. But he wasn’t yet willing to tell Prime Minister Maliki or the American people. First, Washington had to determine the size of a residual force. That dragged on, with the military pushing for a larger force, and the White House for a small presence at or below 10,000, due to costs and the president’s prior “all troops out” position. In June the president decided on the force level (eventually 5,000) and obtained Mr. Maliki’s assent to new SOFA talks.

The Obama administration was willing to “roll over” the terms of the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement as long as the new agreement, like the first, was ratified by the Iraqi Parliament.

Iraqi party leaders repeatedly reviewed the SOFA terms but by October 2011 were at an impasse. All accepted a U.S. troop presence—with the exception of the Sadrist faction, headed by the anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which held some 40 of Iraq’s 325 parliamentary seats. But on immunities only the Kurdish parties, with some 60 seats, would offer support. Neither Mr. Maliki, with some 120 seats, nor former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the leader of the largely Sunni Arab Iraqiya party with 80 more, would definitively provide support. With time running out, given long-standing U.S. policy that troops stationed overseas must have legal immunity, negotiations ended and the troop withdrawal was completed.

Given the success in winning a SOFA in 2008, what led to this failure? First, the need for U.S. troops was not self-evident in 2011. Iraq appeared stable, with oil exports of two million barrels a day at about $90 a barrel, and security much improved. Second, politics had turned against a troop presence; the bitterly anti-U.S. Sadrists were active in Parliament, the Sunni Arabs more ambivalent toward the U.S., and polls indicated that less than 20% of the Iraqi population wanted U.S. troops.

Could the administration have used more leverage, as many have asserted? Again, the main hurdle was immunities. The reality is that foreign troops in any land are generally unpopular and granting them immunity is complicated. In a constitutional democracy it requires parliament to waive its own laws. An agreement signed by Mr. Maliki without parliamentary approval, as he suggested, would not suffice. (The legal status of the small number of “noncombat” U.S. troops currently redeployed to Iraq is an emergency exception to usual SOFA policy.)

Some suggest that the U.S. could have made economic aid or arms deliveries contingent on a Status of Forces Agreement. But by 2011 the U.S. was providing relatively little economic aid to Iraq, and arms deliveries were essential to American and Iraqi security. Was the 5,000 troop number too small to motivate the Iraqis? No Iraqi made that argument to me; generally, smaller forces are more sellable. Could someone other than Mr. Maliki have been more supportive, and were the Iranians opposed? Of course, but with or without Mr. Maliki and Iranians we faced deep resistance from parliamentarians and the public.

Could President Obama have showed more enthusiasm? True, Mr. Obama seemed to feel he couldn’t force an unwanted agreement on the Iraqi people, and he didn’t work with Mr. Maliki as President Bush had. But Mr. Obama spoke or met with Mr. Maliki three times in 2011, and Vice President Joe Biden was constantly in touch. What counted most with Mr. Maliki was not rapport but the coldblooded calculus of pluses and minuses affecting his political fortunes. On the other hand, the negotiations were disrupted repeatedly by White House staffers with public statements inaccurately low-balling the troop numbers and misinterpreting Iraqi decisions.

The withdrawal of troops allowed President Obama to declare that he was “ending the war in Iraq”—oddly, since it was the Bush administration’s military victories and successful negotiation of the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement that had set the timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal. Later, during the 2012 presidential debates, Mr. Obama inexplicably denied that he had even attempted to keep troops in Iraq.

Could a residual force have prevented ISIS’s victories? With troops we would have had better intelligence on al Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS, a more attentive Washington, and no doubt a better-trained Iraqi army. But the common argument that U.S. troops could have produced different Iraqi political outcomes is hogwash. The Iraqi sectarian divides, which ISIS exploited, run deep and were not susceptible to permanent remedy by our troops at their height, let alone by 5,000 trainers under Iraqi restraints.

Iraqis in Shiite-dominated greater Baghdad generally support the army, he said. But he also acknowledged that the army cannot defend the surrounding “Baghdad belt” without the help of thousands of Shiite militiamen Kamil calls “volunteers,” particularly because areas just to the north, west and south have a Sunni majority.

Officers in one of many units that collapsed in Mosul, the 2nd Battalion of Iraq’s 3rd Federal Police Division, said their U.S. training was useful. But as soon as their American advisors left, they said, soldiers and police went back to their ways.

Retired Lt. Gen. James M. Dubik, in charge of Iraqi training in 2007 and 2008, said Maliki’s government intimidated and assassinated Sunni officers while Maliki seized personal control of the security forces from commanders. Human rights groups have accused Iraqi security forces of detaining and killing Sunnis.

Selected quotes from the text above is from By David Zucchino

Why Iraqi army can’t fight, despite $25 billion in U.S. aid, training

 

 

No Definition for Terror

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I have no connections to anyone currently employed by the FBI but I do have several with former FBI’ers. Our formal and non-formal discussions are chilling when it comes to operations, assignments and investigations at the agency.

So FBI, here is a tip, this website http://islamophobia.org/ has listed names and organizations they deem as a threat to Islam. Is this some kind of hit list? What criteria creates such a list and is this approved by the FBI?

But take note FBI, those that are paying attention don’t feel safe in America. Your agency is doing little to sway our fears. Share that same sentiment with Jeh Johnson at DHS please.

It was a few years ago after doing some research and gathering evidence that I attempted to have a dialogue with the local FBI office, the agent on duty asked me if I was an Islamophobe and them hung up on me. It was clearly the time when the FBI was given an edict to be politically correct when it comes to investigations on Islam and all the manuals were stripped from the operating and training systems.

 

FBI Director Robert Mueller in 2012 capitulated with the American Muslim and Arab American lobby groups and announced that more than 700 documents and 300 presentations from training materials. Abed Ayoub was able to take a meeting with Mueller who represented groups including the Islamic Society of North America, Muslim Public Affairs Council, MPAC and CAIR. Included in the dialogue was also Thomas Perez of the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division. It all goes a step further as law enforcement agencies around the country are required to do Muslim outreach in a robust campaign of political correctness. No one in America is allowed to have independent thought regarding Islam, Muslims or terror as it is deemed offensive to Islam.

So in the meantime, America sadly has endured domestic terror attacks but government refuses to apply the term ‘terrorism’ instead using ‘work place violence’ as is noted in the Ft. Hood shooting by Major Nidal Hasan and beheading of Colleen Hufford in Moore, Oklahoma at the hands of Alton Nolen. The mosques are connected by a network of imams that are devoted followers of Anwar al Awlaki killed by an American drone in Yemen a few years ago. We cannot overlook the Tsarneav brothers the killers of the Boston bombing.

While we do have many that have left the shores of America to join Daesh we also witness the black flags and ISIS graffiti in many locations around the country. America also has agreements with many countries in a VISA waiver program, making it easier to made round trip journeys to rogue states like Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan.

So terror is here America and yet what does the FBI have to say or do about it? Crickets…

So when it comes to defining terror, here is a formal summary of the term. We can only hope that the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice will take note and behave and investigate accordingly.

Terrorism Defies Definition

by Daniel Pipes and Teri Blumenfeld The Washington Times October 24, 2014

http://www.meforum.org/4877/terrorism-defies-definition

 

Defining terrorism has practical implications because formally certifying an act of violence as terrorist has important consequences in U.S. law.

Terrorism suspects can be held longer than criminal suspects after arrest without an indictment They can be interrogated without a lawyer present. They receive longer prison sentences. “Terrorist inmates” are subject to many extra restrictions known as Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs. The “Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002” gives corporate victims of terrorism special breaks (it is currently up for renewal) and protects owners of buildings from certain lawsuits. When terrorism is invoked, families of victims, such as of the 2009 Ft. Hood attack, win extra benefits such as tax breaks, life insurance, and combat-related pay. They can even be handed a New York City skyscraper.

Despite the legal power of this term, however, terrorism remains undefined beyond a vague sense of “a non-state actor attacking civilian targets to spread fear for some putative political goal.” One study, Political Terrorism, lists 109 definitions. American security specialist David Tucker wryly remarks that “Above the gates of hell is the warning that all that who enter should abandon hope. Less dire but to the same effect is the warning given to those who try to define terrorism.” The Israeli counterterrorism specialist Boaz Ganor jokes that “The struggle to define terrorism is sometimes as hard as the struggle against terrorism itself.”

This lack of specificity wreaks chaos, especially among police, prosecutors, politicians, press, and professors.

“Violence carried out in connection with an internationally sanctioned terrorist group” such as Al-Qaeda, Hizbullah, or Hamas has become the working police definition of terrorism. This explains such peculiar statements after an attack as, “We have not found any links to terrorism,” which absurdly implies that “lone wolves” are never terrorists.

The whole world, except the U.S. Department of the Treasury, sees the Boston Marathon bombings as terrorism.

If they are not terrorists, the police must find other explanation to account for their acts of violence. Usually, they offer up some personal problem: insanity, family tensions, a work dispute, “teen immigrant angst,” a prescription drug, or even a turbulent airplane ride. Emphasizing personal demons over ideology, they focus on an perpetrator’s (usually irrelevant) private life, ignoring his far more significant political motives.

But then, inconsistently, they do not require some connection to an international group. When Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez shot eight rounds at the White House in November 2011, the U.S. attorney asserted that “Firing an assault rifle at the White House to make a political statement is terrorism, plain and simple” – no international terrorist group needed. Similarly, after Paul Anthony Ciancia went on a shooting spree at Los Angeles International Airport in November 2013, killing a TSA officer, the indictment accused him of “substantial planning and premeditation to cause the death of a person and to commit an act of terrorism.”

This terminological irregularity breeds utter confusion. The whole world calls the Boston Marathon bombings terrorism – except the Department of the Treasury, which, 1½ years on “has not determined that there has been an ‘act of terrorism’ under the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act.” The judge presiding over the terrorism trial in January 2014 of Jose Pimentel, accused of planning to set off pipe bombs in Manhattan, denied the prosecution’s request for an expert to justify a charge of terrorism. Government officials sometimes just throw up their hands: Asked in June 2013 if the U.S. government considers the Taliban a terrorist group, the State Department spokeswoman replied “Well, I’m not sure how they’re defined at this particular moment.”

The U.S. Department of State has yet to figure out whether the Taliban are or are not terrorists.

A May 2013 shooting in New Orleans, which injured 19, was even more muddled. An FBI spokeswoman called it not terrorism but “strictly an act of street violence.” The mayor disagreed; asked if he considered it terrorism, he said “I think so,” because families “are afraid of going outside.” Challenged to disentangle this contradiction, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s New Orleans field made matters even more opaque: “You can say this is definitely urban terrorism; it’s urban terror. But from the FBI standpoint and for what we deal with on a national level, it’s not what we consider terrorism, per se.” Got that?

This lack of clarity presents a significant public policy challenge. Terrorism, with all its legal and financial implications, cannot remain a vague, subjective concept but requires a precise and accurate definition, consistently applied.

After releasing the Taliban 5, matters are worse when it comes to Afghanistan, Syria Yemen, Qatar and Iraq. We witnessed carefully the hostilities between Israel and Hamas and then we watched the demonstrations in America and Europe of those standing in solidarity with Hamas. So, hey, FBI, if you are going to do outreach, it should be to those in America that don’t trust you or the lack of security we feel. Your agenda is misplaced and sadly I would think any agents would be demanding a pro-active objective against jihad in America have long memories. This is shameful.

 

 

 

Putin: Nyet on NATO

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Vladimir is getting a huge pass by the White House and John Kerry ignoring what he is doing. Seems the burden of dealing with Russia’s aggressions comes down to General Breedlove, the U.S. Commander of U.S. European and the 17th Supreme Allied Commander, Europe.

Russia seems to be pretty angry with its neighboring countries in the Baltic Sea—especially Sweden. A couple of weeks ago, on October 2, Sweden’s authority for signals intelligence (FRA) leaked a photo of a Russian fighter jet flying only about 30 feet away from a Swedish Armed Forces intelligence plane. Russian warships have threatened a Finnish research vessel in the Baltic Sea on two occasions—August 2 and September 2, and on October 7, armed NATO fighter jets followed Russian fighters above the Swedish island Öland in the Baltic Sea. Last year the country simulated a nuclear attack against Sweden, and Russian jets have been showing off their weapons by exposing their undercarriages when approaching Swedish aircraft.

Portuguese fighter jets intercepted seven Russian jets over the Baltic Sea. Simultaneously, Turkish fighters were scrambled to intercept two Russian bombers and two fighters over the Black Sea.

The English RAF also intercepted eight Russian aircraft over the North Sea. After the interception, the formation split, with the fighters and a tanker returning to Russia while two bombers continued towards the Atlantic. The bombers were later intercepted again by the Portuguese over the Atlantic. For a full list of Russian military aggression in the last year go here.

The Pentagon is well aware of these activities and has intelligence briefings daily with the NATO command. Then last week, it finally came out that Russia was responsible for hacking into the White House internet systems. On Tuesday came reports in the American media that Russian-based hackers had breached some computer networks at the White House earlier this month, triggering an investigation by the FBI, the National Security Agency and the Secret Service. No Obama administration official went on record over the alleged incident, preferring to feed anonymous anti-Russian comments to the Washington Post and many other press outlets.

Then there is Poland, Preparing for Invasion

But Poland is the real issue when it comes to defending NATO’s exposed Eastern frontier from Russian aggression. Only Poland, which occupies the Alliance’s central front, has the military power to seriously blunt any Russian moves westward. As in 1920, when the Red Army failed to push past Warsaw, Poland is the wall that will defend Central Europe from any westward movement by Moscow’s military. To their credit, and thanks to a long history of understanding the Russian mentality better than most NATO and EU members, Warsaw last fall, when the violent theft of Crimea was still just a Kremlin dream, announced a revised national security strategy emphasizing territorial defense. Eschewing American-led overseas expeditions like those to Iraq and Afghanistan that occupied Poland’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) during the post-9/11 era, this new doctrine makes defending Poland from Eastern aggression the main job of its military. Presciently, then-Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, contradicting optimistic European and NATO presumptions of our era that conventional war in Europe was unthinkable, stated in May 2013, “I’m afraid conflict in Europe is imaginable.”

Particularly in light of the fact that both NATO and the Obama administration rejected my advice to seriously bolster Alliance defenses in the East with four heavy brigades, including the two brigades that Warsaw explicitly asked NATO — meaning, in practice, the United States — for after this year’s Russo-Ukrainian War began in earnest, the issue of Poland’s military readiness is of considerable importance to countries far beyond Poland. Instead of creating a militarily viable NATO tripwire that would deter Russian aggression, the Alliance, and Washington, DC, have opted for symbolic gestures — speeches, military visits, small exercises — that impress the Western media but not the Russians.

Simply put: Can Poland defend itself if Putin decides to move his aggression westward? Even if NATO rides to the rescue, as they would be required to under Article 5 — that is now an “if” question to many in Warsaw — will the Polish military be able to buy sufficient time for the Alliance to come to their aid? Notwithstanding that Poland (and Estonia) are the only “new NATO” members that take their Alliance obligations fully seriously, spending more than the required two percent of GDP on defense — a standard almost all longstanding NATO members can’t manage to meet — there are serious doubts about the ability of Poland’s armed forces to defend against a major Russian move to the West.

There is good news. When it comes to resisting what I term Special War — that shadowy amalgam of espionage, terrorism, and subversion at which the Kremlin excels — Warsaw, with its long acquaintance with sneaky Russian games, is probably better equipped than any almost NATO country to deter and defeat Putin’s secret offensive. The recent arrests of two Polish agents of Russian military intelligence (GRU), one of them a Polish military officer assigned to the MoD, sent a clear message to Moscow that Special War will be countered with aggressive counterintelligence.

When it comes to conventional defense, however, the news from Poland appears less rosy. Despite the fact that no one questions the basic competence of the Polish armed forces, nor the impressiveness of their current defense acquisition program, there is a matter of size. The recent MoD announcement that it is moving thousands of troops closer to the country’s borders with Belarus and Ukraine, where any threat would emerge, is encouraging but not sufficient (thanks to the Cold War, when Poland’s Communist military was directed westward, most of its major military bases are closer to Germany than the East). Since the abandonment of conscription five years ago, a cumbersome process that caused readiness problems for some time, Warsaw’s armed forces come to only 120,000 active duty troops, with less than 48,000 in the ground forces (i.e. the army). That number is insufficient to man the army’s structure of three divisions with thirteen maneuver brigades (ten of them armored or mechanized).

A solution to this manpower shortfall was supposed to be found in the establishment of the National Reserve Forces (NSR), with 20,000 fully trained part-time volunteers who would flesh out the order of battle in a crisis. Yet the NSR, which was announced by the MoD five years ago with much fanfare, has had considerable teething problems, with shortages of recruits and inadequate training budgets. Recent reports indicate both morale and readiness are low among NSR soldiers, who feel poorly treated by the regular military, while none dispute that the force has only recruited and trained 10,000 troops, half the target figure.

Quality can compensate for deficient quantity to an extent, and Poland’s recent acquisition of more late-model Leopard II tanks from Germany, adding to the 124 it already has, means they will be able to replace most of their Soviet-model legacy armor, and meet any Russian incursion on an equal footing in terms of quality, if not quantity. By approximately 2020, the air force will have wholly replaced its Soviet-era helicopters, buying 150 modern airframes, while the MoD plans to purchase thirty-two late-model attack helicopters by 2022, which would pose a significant threat to Russian armor.

More interesting still are plans taking shape to give Warsaw asymmetric deep-strike capabilities to resist Russian aggression. The navy and the army intend to acquire long-range missiles to counter superior Russian numbers, but the cornerstone of the deterrence concept called “Polish Fangs” by Warsaw is the AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM), to be carried by the air force’s F-16 fleet (the wing of forty-eight F-16’s is the backbone of Polish airpower). Combined with drones and Poland’s excellent special operations forces, which are among the best in NATO, Warsaw believes that the American-made JASSM on the American-made F-16 will give them an important qualitative advantage over the Russians, including the ability to precisely hit targets up to 370 kilometers behind enemy lines.

Look up in the sky, you just may see Russian aircraft….then if you do, send a tweet to the White House, they are missing the memos.

 

Jill, the Limitless love of a Mom

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Nothing warms the heart more than when a mom can win a battle, this battle was for Jill Tahmooressi and freeing her son from a Mexican prison. After 214 days in a hellhole, the work of a handful of Republican congress members and the attorney, Fernando Benitez, the Judge Victor Octavio Luna Escobedo delivered a ruling on humanitarian grounds due to PTSD of which Andrew suffers from two tours in Afghanistan as a Marine.

While there were a handful of lawyers assigned early to the case, between the final lawyer Benitez, Greta Van Susteren and the devoted mom, Jill, the truth in this case prevailed, there were no slick legal fare that was applied and Mexico under public relations pressure finally dropped all charges against Andrew.

Jill kept a journal of her efforts to free her son. Jill made countless appearances in the media and went so far as to load a petition on the White House website which after 100,000 signatures, Barack Obama is by edict to respond, yet as of this writing never did.

 

Jill and Andrew’s story was fully explained by the Fox show host Greta Van Susteren which was designed to get to ALL the truths of the case. The Fox news channel was as tireless as was Jill to gain the attention and release of Andrew. The most compelling appearance was the day Jill, Montel Williams, Pete Hegseth and Marine teammate Robert Buchanan delivered compelling congressional testimony on behalf of Andrew’s release. The most aggressive argument was why release the Taliban 5 for the deserter Bowe Bergdahl and not Andrew, this defied logic and politics.

 

Absent from any real part of the mission to bring Andrew home was SecState John Kerry, President Barack Obama, VP Joe Biden, or even Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the congresswoman in the home district of Jill Tahmooressi. Yet, this should not detract from the fact that Andrew is home. Andrew received a priest daily while in La Mesa prison designed to keep dark thoughts away and to bridge his mental state until such time he can enroll in a PTSD program from his time in Afghanistan.

Welcome home Andrew and may all the blessings be with you and your mother at this time, we wish you a speedy recovery and a bright future. The country was praying and supporting you as you did for your country.

Semper Fi.

 

John Kerry in the Middle of the Iranian Circle Jerk

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Sheesh, is it dementia? Is it willful blindness? Is it the quest for the Nobel Peace Prize? What the hell is John Kerry doing marching to the orders of Barack Obama and Susan Rice? C’mon America, you low information types have a duty to pay attention, start here.

Iran is a state sponsor of terror, the historical facts prove that. Iran was named a terror state in 1984 by the State Department. Surely Kerry has the memo on that. Okay, so in case the reader and even John Kerry along with Marie Harf, Jen Psaki should check with Victoria Nuland on this…oh wait…let us review some factual history.

 

 

It should also be noted that the State Department has its own intelligence division and situation room such that real-time intelligence reports are created and received there as well as in the White House, ignorance is no excuse, except for State Department leadership.

Last Thursday marked the 31st anniversary of Hezbollah’s twin attack on the US Marine barracks and the French paratroopers base in Beirut in 1983. The date passed quietly; ancient history as far as the Obama White House is concerned. Then it is important to know that Iran supports Palestinian terror organizations. Even the liberal think tank the Brookings Institute gave detailed testimony to Congress just two years ago about Iran and their terrorism activities.
Now lets bring this forward to Syria as Assad has fighters fighting within his regime from Afghanistan. This is especially chilling as they are paid transplants coordinated by whom? IRAN !!


From CNN:

“My name is Sayed Ahmad Hussaini. The Iranians pay people like me to come here and fight. I am from Afghanistan and I am an immigrant in Iran. The Iranians brought us to Syria to fight to defend the Zainab shrine. I don’t want to fight anymore.”

He says he wants to go home, and that he was paid about $500 a month to fight. There are many Afghan immigrants in Iran, trying to find some shelter from the decades of war that have torn apart their land. He says he was trained and then sent to assist the regime.

It is potentially a serious development in the Syrian war, and explains in some ways how the Syrian regime has gained ground in some areas after months of appearing exhausted.

So understand this, John Kerry and the White House has postured America on the side of the Iranians and that of Bashir al Assad in the fight against Islamic State. But we also want to destroy the Assad regime, or do we? Assad is the core reason for the millions of Syrian refugees straining countries like Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. Yet, Assad has had years of help from Iran and Russia, so this chessboard has too many rook(ies) and under this administration a checkmate is clearly not in the near future.

Daesh was operating in Iraq in late 2010 as well as in Syria and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi is based in Syria pulling all the strings for the organization.  Susan Rice, the Obama National Security Advisor is completely micro-managing this war with Daesh (ISIS) which was not born in Syria but headquarters in Syria.  The Pentagon is ripping angry over the White House designed rules of engagement in Iraq and Syria such that even Secretary Hagel has pushed back.

The Pentagon brass placed in charge of implementing Obama’s war against ISIS are getting fed up with the short leash the White House put them on.
Top military leaders in the Pentagon and in the field are growing increasingly frustrated by the tight constraints the White House has placed on the plans to fight ISIS and train a new Syrian rebel army.

As the American-led battle against ISIS stretches into its fourth month, the generals and Pentagon officials leading the air campaign and preparing to train Syrian rebels are working under strict White House orders to keep the war contained within policy limits. The National Security Council has given precise instructions on which rebels can be engaged, who can be trained, and what exactly those fighters will do when they return to Syria. Most of the rebels to be trained by the U.S. will never be sent to fight against ISIS.

Maybe retired General John Allen who is the personal envoy of John Kerry can sort it all out. That is a big NO….he does not enjoy any regard from the Pentagon either.

An article posted at Foreign Policy on Thursday by Mark Perry lists a surprising number of detractors to Allen’s appointment, including many in and out of uniform. The most obvious rift comes from Gen. Lloyd Austin, the man in charge of Central Command, tasked with carrying out the military plan to “degrade and destroy” ISIL, the administration’s preferred acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

“Why the hell do we need a special envoy — isn’t that what [Secretary of State] John Kerry’s for?” a senior officer close to Austin told Perry, of the potential for confusion since Gen. Allen reports directly to President Obama.

Allen, 60, was given an incredibly difficult task upon his appointment. With the Islamic State consuming much of Iraq and Syria and boasting roughly 31,000 fighters, his role as special envoy is to “help build and sustain the coalition,” and coordinate their efforts, according to the State Department.

But Allen —  now inside the State Department and no longer wearing military rank — commands a role  not very far outside the scope of duties of Gen. Austin at Centcom, who is charged with overseeing relationships, offering military support, and carrying out operations when necessary in 20 Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq and Syria.

Simply in summary, just wait until after the mid-term elections, maybe everyone will have more flexibility. Iran is enjoying most of it now courtesy of John Kerry the White House dissed soldier on diplomacy.

Sheesh…