Israel Matzav

Iraq has been begging for US air strikes since November

Eli Lake reports that Iraq has been begging the United States for air strikes since November (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

While Iraq’s government is not requesting a surge in U.S. ground forces like the one President Bush ordered in 2007, Maliki’s government has been asking for the U.S. to conduct targeted air strikes and the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance work to find those targets.

And there are plenty of new targets. On Tuesday, the al Qaeda offshoot known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (ISIS) overran Iraqi military positions in Mosul, the country’s second-largest city. On Wednesday, reports from Iraq said the terrorist group was pushing toward Iraq’s capital, Baghdad.

If President Obama agrees to launch drone strikes in Iraq, it would not be unprecedented for the region. The United States is playing a similar role in Iraq’s neighbor, Yemen, with intense counterterrorism training and drone strikes. But Obama also has boasted that he ended the U.S. war in Iraq and thus far has been hesitant to reenter the conflict.

“What we really need right now are drone strikes and air strikes,” said a senior Iraqi official Wednesday. But the official stressed that so far the Obama administration has been reluctant.

A senior U.S. military official told The Daily Beast on Wednesday that the request for U.S. air strikes inside Iraq has been discussed in recent months. “There are no plans right now to participate in anything like this,” the official said. In earlier conversations, the official said the U.S. side “did not give them a hard no—it was ‘Thanks for your interest and we will talk about it more.’”

...

[T]wo senior Iraqi officials told The Daily Beast that Iraq indeed has asked for the United States to conduct air strikes inside the country since November, when Maliki visited Washington.

In an interview Wednesday, Iraqi Ambassador Lukman Faily declined to discuss any specifics of the Iraqi military requests to the United States. But he did say, “We are asking for almost everything short of boots on the ground.” Faily described the requests as falling into the category of “counterterrorism cooperation.”

Am I mistaken or is there no one other than the 'Palestinians' that receives the consistent support of this administration?

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iraq

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:51 PM