The present-day U.S. military qualifies by any measure as highly professional, much more so than its Cold War predecessor. Yet the purpose of today’s professionals is not to preserve peace but to fight unending wars in distant places. Intoxicated by a post-Cold War belief in its own omnipotence, the United States allowed itself to be drawn into a long series of armed conflicts, almost all of them yielding unintended consequences and imposing greater than anticipated costs. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. forces have destroyed many targets and killed many people. Only rarely, however, have they succeeded in accomplishing their assigned political purposes. . . . [F]rom our present vantage point, it becomes apparent that the “Revolution of ‘89” did not initiate a new era of history. At most, the events of that year fostered various unhelpful illusions that impeded our capacity to recognize and respond to the forces of change that actually matter.

Andrew Bacevich


Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Update for Wednesday, January 20, 2016

The UN reports that nearly 19,000 Iraqi civilians died violently between January 2014 and October 2015, with an additional 36,000 wounded and 3.5 million people displaced. Most of the responsibility falls on IS. The UN also reports that IS holds about 3,500 people as slaves, many of them women and girls kept for sexual exploitation.
The three Americans kidnapped on Friday have been publicly identified. They are reportedly held by a Shiite militia but there is no evidence that Iran is involved. They are identified as Amro Mohammed, an Egyptian-American, Wael al-Mahdawy, an Iraqi-American, and Russel Furat, an Iraqi-American woman. At least two of them work for General Dynamics and were training Iraqi troops. They were kidnapped because they are U.S. citizens. The report about the location from which they were taken being a brothel was apparently fictitious. (And the source, to which I did not link, was Fox News.)

Satellite images show IS has destroyed the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq.

Amnesty International accuses Kurdish troops of destroying Arab villages under their control, using bulldozers, explosives, and arson.

The U.S. is said to have taken control of an airfield in Kurdish controlled territory in Syria. If so, it is extraordinary that this has not been reported in the U.S. CentCom neither affirms nor denies it. This means, of course, that U.S. forces now occupy Syrian territory.

 


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

When is Isis going to be terminated for good why does it have to take forever for plans to destroy Isis so long its making literally no sense all it takes is one call to say to all troops destroy them all if you have a lot of important officials helping plans shouldn't take that long to make get your mind in focus

Cervantes said...

They control cities with large civilian populations. You can't just blow them up, it's going to take time.