He plans to launch an enlistment campaign to organize a "popular army" similar to the National Defense Forces in Syria.
Got that? The ISIS militia is just a few miles from Baghdad and al-Maliki thinks he's going to whip up an army in the next couple of hours that will repel them.
Good luck with that, Mr President.
Of course, many people feel that Obama and Co. are just pretending to be surprised at the sudden turn of events; that they actually knew something like this was brewing all along but decided to look the other way figuring that the ISIS aggression would help to implement their larger regional strategy to disempower Arab-controlled nation-states by erasing existing borders and creating a "soft partition" that would strengthen US-Israeli hegemony, making it easier to repress the indigenous population and pilfer their resources. This is from an article by Al Hayat correspondent, Raghida Dergham:
"While ISIS, with its haphazardness, destructive ideology, and appalling ignorance, spreads from Deir al-Zour to the borders of Kurdistan, achieving its wretched victories, regional and international powers are rushing to take advantage of the situation to further their interests...
"All trans-border armies think themselves as makers of a new history by overturning Sykes-Picot. These are the armies of destroying and abolishing borders. As it seems, no one is standing in their way no matter how much NATO powers pretend to be panicked and no matter how many concerned statements the United Nations make. What is frightening is that there are international forces supporting mobile radical armies in their bid to cross borders, to use them in wars of attrition against traditional armies, with a view to partition existing countries in the Arab region.
"ISIS [is] not the response to the plans to fragment the Arab region and strengthen Iranian hegemony but is actually an instrument in those plans, whether ISIS is aware of this or naà ¯vely oblivious to the fact. ISIS is destroying the Arabs and undermining Sunni moderates, because it is part of a sinister project to which it was driven voluntarily or by coincidence. All those extending help to ISIS and similar groups like al-Nusra Front, and other Salafist or Wahhabi militias, are directly contributing to the collapse of Syria and Iraq, no matter how much they think they are making history.
"Iraq today is on the brink of collapsing into civil war and partition, if not fragmentation. No one will come out victorious in the coming Iraq war." (ISIS 'Achievements' in Iraq and Syria a Gift to the Iranian Negotiator?, Raghida Dergham, Huffington Post)
The author clearly believes that Iran is a big player in these regional games of power politics, but as she concedes later in the article: "the United States is not innocent of these plans. In the minds of many, it is the side that manufactures and encourages extremism, be it Sunni or Shiite, to divide the Arab region and allow Iran to dominate it, with Israeli collusion."
Isn't this what's really going on? While outside observers may not know the particular details, they can assume with some confidence that foreign powerbrokers -- Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the US -- are all deeply involved and are looking for ways to shape the outcome. All four of these countries are up to their axels in the bloody game of geopolitics, and are using Iraq as a staging ground for the own hegemonic ambitions.
Although we have no idea what will happen in the next few weeks, we know who the losers will be in this latest regional slugfest -- the Iraqi people.
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