The war our primal knuckle-dragging minster wants to get us involve in is stupid. This is why:

Isil is Sunni extremism. let's call it "black flag". Isil is a derivative of another "black flag": Al Qeada et al.

The Sunnis around the world (Saudis, UAE, Qatar) support Sunni extremism. Lets call them "green flag"

The Aussies ("yellow flag") are going to fight Isil by using bases in "green flag" to go and fight "black flag".

The Americans ("orange flag") fighting "black flag" are helping "green flag" to develop soldiers to attack "black flag" and "blue flag".

"Blue flag" is Syria and Iran. Remember, we've installed a "blue flag" government in Iraq because we wanted that country to have democracy. "Blue flag" is Shiite. "Black flag" is fighting "blue flag" in that country (Iraq) as well.

We love "green flag". We hate "black flag". Meanwhile we also hate "blue flag". "Blue flag" is being fought by "green flag" and "black flag" united in Syria. 

Meanwhile "blue flag" is friend with "red flag". The Russians.

But we're helping "blue flag" defeat "black flag" by being allied with "green flag"... We also hate "red flag".

Whenever "yellow flag" is going to fly out of "green flag" to attack "black flag", "black flag" will get advance warming, because "green flag" is discreetly supporting "black flag". But "yellow flag" thinks the sun is shining out if arse because it has god on its side.

"Orange flag" needs a rainbow of flags to help understand that going to war is stupid here, unless they convince "green flag" not to help "Black Flag". This ain't going to happen as many "green flag" supporters in "yellow flag" and "orange flag" countries are already fighting on the side of "black flag". 

Is this not telling you anything? Does "green flag" want the demise of "black flag"? Not really. 

Who can really defeat "black flag"? "Blue flag" and "red flag" could, but we don't want their help since we hate them both. 

Making sense? We're screwing ourselves...

Contradictory interests bedevil US strategy

Updated 1 Sep 2014, 4:24pm

Mon 1 Sep 2014, 4:24pm

In an op-ed piece published Friday in the New York Times, US Secretary of State John Kerry called for the formation of a "global coalition using political, humanitarian, economic, law enforcement and intelligence tools to support military force" to confront and defeat the Islamic State. This, taken with President Barack Obama’s statement earlier in the week that he had directed Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel, along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to begin developing a range of strategies to combat the Islamic State, demonstrates a robust shift in an American foreign policy that had thus far trod very lightly in response to the terrorist group sweeping across large swathes of Iraq and Syria.

While the proposed coalition will include many of America's NATO allies, and of course Australia, the single most important factor upon which the long-term success of confronting the Islamic State hinges is securing the cooperation of Sunnis, both within Iraq and Syria, and in governments across the Middle-East.

In forming such a coalition, and successfully defeating the Islamic State, the United States will need to overcome not only its own split strategic thinking in the region, but also secure the support of its Sunni Arab allies in the Gulf States in a campaign with the essential aim of destroying the main Sunni resistance movement to two widely unpopular Shia governments, which act as proxy states of Iran.

The difficulties of this task lie in the broader regional power dynamics. It may prove a bridge too far.

Paul McGeough

The smart thing for Western leaders in the wake of John Kerry's session with Arab leaders in Jeddah on Thursday last, would have been to bide their time. And it would have been smart too to bide their time a bit more after Sunday's grim reports of another Westerner beheaded by these crazed thugs who strut as Islamic freedom fighters in the deserts of Syria and Iraq.

But Tony Abbott leapt straight in – committing 600 Australian military personnel and more aircraft to the conflict, thereby giving the Arab leaders good reason to believe that if they sit on their hands for long enough, the West will fight their war for them.

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Gus: Tony is a foolish idiot who is eager to do fucups, in the name of godly thuggery for political expediency... He never understood anything and never will. He only got traction because of another smart imbecile called Rupert who has a tons of literate ignorant minions, spruiking the bad oil. Idiots.

And the "Arab league" of "royal" Wahhabi Sunnis will stay very cold on the idea of fighting Sunni Whahabi extremists...

The major fault of the "western" leaders such as Tony Abbott is that they NEVER understood ANYTHING, least the concept of tribes and of religious divides. They only think politics revolve around "nations" — most boundaries of which have been artificially created by western thuggery for profit (stealing resources) — and the black and white notion of them against us... Idiots. They are neo-fascist socio-psychopathic capitalists... 

Indonesian terrorists have begun talking about targeting Westerners again, in response to United States air strikes in Iraq.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has announced Australia will send troops to the Middle East to potentially join an international coalition to fight the brutal Islamic State (IS) militant group which has captured swatches of territory in Iraq and Syria.

There has not been a major attack on a Western target in Indonesia since the 2009 hotel bombings in Jakarta.

However, an Indonesian terrorism researcher who runs an anti-radicalisation programs for terrorists has warned that Australian military involvement in Iraq risks making Australians a target again.

Taufik Andrie, who runs deradicalisation programs for terrorists, said Indonesian supporters of IS militants have begun discussing US intervention in Iraq and the re-emergence of Westerners as targets.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-15/indonesian-terrorists-discuss-attacks-over-is-action/5743076

see also: yellow and orange versus black and green and blue and red...

Could someone high up, say a judge or a Palmer (our own GG would be in favour of war, wouldn't he...), demands that Tony Abbott be removed from office this instant for INSANITY? I am sure it could be proven in a court of law. Piece of cake. The man is nuts!

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has warned Australian Muslims they will be acting "against God" if they join Islamic State and said they would find themselves in more danger as a result of the Australian military being deployed to help destroy the militant group.

Mr Abbott hit the media airwaves on Monday, conducting four interviews and a media conference from Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, to explain his decision to send a military team of 600 to join the US-led effort to degrade the terror group, also known as ISIL.

From Richard Ackland: "Leadership at last!" (Gus thinks that Ackland was being restrained and did not post: "leadershit now!")

...

Yet we saddle up knowing nothing of the historical or cultural context of what has gripped northern Iraq and Syria. No one in the war party has made the most cursory attempt to get to grips with the forces that are at play. Instead, the reflex position is to answer the call of our great and powerful US ally as some sort of speculative down payment on a security insurance policy.

The opposition tags along for fear of being outgunned in this war of overwrought opportunism. At the same time Scott Morrison, who has somehow interposed himself as some sort of security saviour, has been sending Iraqi and Syrian asylum seekers back to their disturbed homelands.

Then there is the home grown danger: the lone wolf within. This too is folded into the case put by the war machine. Irvine told a media conference on Friday: “I worry, and worried for five and a half years, about lone wolves popping up who’ve avoided the radar in some way or another.” Abbott added that some 30 Australians we know went to Afghanistan and Pakistan a decade or so back to work with the Taliban. “Some 25 of them returned to Australia and about two-thirds of those were subsequently involved in terrorist activities here in Australia. I think nine were convicted of terrorist activities here in Australia.” That’s slightly more than the 20 returnees Abbott was bandying about earlier last week. The numbers seem rubbery.

The prospect of a lone wolf attack is not a fresh danger and it doesn’t need the security alert to shift a notch. It certainly won’t be overcome by sending forces into an impenetrable tribal and religious war – in fact, that engagement will significantly increase the prospect of a threat on home soil. The passports of some Australians who pose a risk have been cancelled and others still here are being monitored. However, Abbott reassured us that a terror attack is not imminent. On Friday he said: “we have no specific intelligence of particular plots”.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/15/leadership-at-last-but-where-will-the-iraq-war-machine-take-australia

Note that all this war crap is now filling the headline spaces on all news channels, spaces that would have "normally" been reserved for yet another Liberal (CONservative) Party member of parliament taking cash under the table...

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See the colours above: yellow and orange versus black and green and blue and red...

The UN Security Council (UNSC), the only international body empowered to declare war and peace, continues to remain a silent witness to the widespread devastation and killings worldwide, including in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Ukraine.

A sharply divided UNSC has watched the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel, the genocide and war crimes in Syria, the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, the U.S. military attacks inside Iraq and now a virtual invasion of Syria – if U.S. President Barack Obama goes ahead with his threat to launch air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The United States has refused to go before the UNSC for authorization and legitimacy – even if it means suffering a veto by Russia or China or both.

Still, ironically, Obama is scheduled to preside over a UNSC meeting when he is in New York in late September since the United States holds the presidency under geographical rotation among the 15 members in the Council.

A head of state or a head of government chairing a meeting of the Security Council is a rare event, not a norm.

But it does happen when a UNSC member presides over the Council in the month of September during the opening of a new General Assembly session, with over 150 world leaders in tow.

In his address to the nation early this week, Obama said, “I will chair a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to further mobilise the international community around this effort” (“to degrade and destroy ISIS”, the rebel Islamic militant group inside Iraq and Syria).

Still, the proposed strike inside Syria is not part of the Council’s agenda – and certainly not under the U.S. presidency.

Obama also said intelligence agencies have not detected any specific ISIS plots against the United States.

ISIS is still a regional threat that could ultimately reach out to the United States, he said, justifying the impending attacks.

Norman Solomon, executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of RootsAction.org, told IPS, “As an instrument for preventing or restraining war, the United Nations has devolved into a plaintive institution, with its Security Council dominated by superpowers — most of all by the United States in tandem with its permanent-member allies.”

He said it used to be that U.S. presidents at least went through the motions of seeking Security Council approval for going to war, but this is scarcely the case anymore.

“When it lacks the capacity to get what it wants by way of a non-vetoed Security Council resolution for its war aims, the U.S. government simply proceeds as though the United Nations has no significant existence,” said Solomon, author of ‘War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.’

Internationally, he said, this is the case because there are no geopolitical leverage points or institutional U.N. frameworks sufficient to require the United States to actually take the Security Council seriously as anything much more than a platform for pontification.

A Russian official was quoted as saying the Obama administration would need to get a UNSC resolution before it launches air attacks inside Syria — which, of course, the Russians did not do either before they intervened in Ukraine.

Perhaps all this points only in one direction: the UNSC has time and again proved its unworthiness – and remains ineffective and politically impotent having outlived its usefulness, particularly in crisis situations.

Humanitarian aid? Yes. Collective international action? No.

The veto-wielding permanent members of the UNSC – the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia – are obviously not interested in fairness, justice or political integrity but only interested in protecting their own national interests.

In an editorial Friday, the New York Times struck a cautious note when it said there will be no turning back once air strikes enter Syrian territory, unleashing events that simply cannot be foreseen.

“Surely, that’s a lesson America has learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco where he serves as coordinator of the program in Middle Eastern Studies, told IPS, “Regardless of whether it is justified or not, air strikes by the United States or other foreign powers in Iraq and Syria are clearly acts of war requiring U.N. authorization.”

If the threat from ISIS and the limited nature of the military response is what President Obama says it is, then the United States should have little trouble in receiving support from the Security Council, said Zunes, who has written extensively on the politics of the Security Council and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.

“The refusal to come to the United Nations, then, serves as yet another example of the contempt Washington apparently has for the world body,” he said.

Peter Yeo, executive director of Better World Campaign, a non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to strengthening U.S.-U.N. relations, has called on the U.S. Congress to engage the United Nations in addressing the critical challenges in the Middle East, including Syria and Iraq.

“Let Congress know the U.S. cannot go it alone in confronting this challenge, and that we should continue to utilize resources like the U.N. Security Council and the U.N.’s humanitarian response agencies to combat ongoing and future threats,” he said.

More than ever, the U.S. needs the U.N. as a strategic partner to help facilitate the complex security and humanitarian response needs in the region, he said in a statement released Thursday.

Solomon told IPS that the domestic politics of the U.S. have been sculpted in recent decades to relegate the U.N. to the role of afterthought or oratorical amphitheatre unless it can be coupled to the U.S. war train of the historic moment.

“Deformed as it is as a representation of only the governments of some sectors of global power, the Security Council still has some potential for valid exercise of discourse – even diplomacy – if not legitimate decision-making per se.”

But the Security Council ultimately represents the skewed agendas of its permanent members, and those agendas only include peace to the extent that permanent members are actually interested in peace and such interest, at best intermittent, depends on undependable willingness to look beyond narrow nationalistic and corporate interests, Solomon added.

“Of course, the U.S. government has continued to engage in acts of war in several countries on an ongoing basis for more than a dozen years.”

The military strikes now being planned by the White House will add Syria to the list of countries attacked by a Washington-based government that speaks loudly about international law at the same time that it violates international law at will, he argued.

The U.S. government will decide whether to seek any authorization or resolution from the U.N. Security Council primarily on the basis of gauging likely benefits of rhetorical grandstanding, Solomon predicted.

US Bypasses Security Council On Impending Invasion Of Syria By Thalif Deen

The ISIS rampage through Iraq and much of Syria, roiling Washington and other world capitals, gives rise to an interesting question: Who would win a contest to be named America’s most worthless Mideast ally? Competition is fierce, but three countries are clear frontrunners.

There is Saudi Arabia, whose princely emissaries to Washington have been confidants of presidents and fixtures on the Georgetown party circuit, a country whose rulers and princes possess seemingly unlimited amounts of discretionary income. They have used this wealth to subsidize worldwide the teaching of the most extremist and intolerant variants of Islam, but also to prop up the US defense industry by buying at every opportunity the most elaborate weapons systems we would sell them. It isn’t yet known whether Saudi pilots can actually effectively fly these advanced fighter aircraft under combat conditions. (There is sufficient evidence however that even relatively untrained Saudis can learn to steer a fully loaded 747 into a fixed ground target.)

What do the Saudis do with their shiny F-16′s and spanking new tanks? One might have hoped to see Saudi forces in action against ISIS—which really hasn’t had any success against a military formation that has been systematically trained and adequately armed. But this isn’t happening, probably because Saudi leaders realize that a great many Saudis (a majority?) actually agree with the ISIS ideology, and there is no guarantee they wouldn’t defect to ISIS if called upon to battle it. Among the best few sentences written since the onset of the crisis comes from veteran observer William Pfaff, who pointed to the stakes:

Moreover, is it fully appreciated in Washington that the “New Caliphate” has every intention of taking over the existing role in Islamic society of Saudi Arabia? It wants to conquer and occupy Mecca. If it succeeds, the Saudis themselves will be submitted to the ferocious discipline the ISIS practices. The Saudi ladies who now complain that they are not allowed to drive cars will find themselves in a new world indeed!

Then there is Turkey, an actual NATO member, a Muslim majority country which bridges Asia and Europe, a country with a considerable middle class and millions of educated and highly trained citizens. There are smart people in Washington and beyond who have held great hopes for Turkey: that it might solve the seemingly intractable riddle of how to combine Islam with modern democracy; that it might provide meaningful diplomatic support to the Palestinians; that it could both restrain America from disastrous blunders (as it tried to do in Iraq) and exert its growing influence on behalf of social and scientific progress in the region as a whole.

I shared those hopes, but have to admit they now seem pretty naive. Faced with an aggressive extremist Sunni movement beheading people on its borders, Turkey’s leaders choose to focus on the alleged dangers posed by its own long-restive Kurdish minority, while remaining obsessed with the Alawite (i.e. not Sunni Muslim) regime in neighboring Syria. Turkey has allowed ISIS to be replenished by allowing its own territory to be used as a transit zone for jihadist volunteers. If, as seems plausible at this writing, the Syrian-Kurdish town of Kobani falls while Turkey’s powerful NATO-armed military observes placidly from just over the border, it will be a long time before anyone in Washington will be able to say “our ally Turkey” with a straight face again.

Then there is Israel, usually touted as the best of American friends in the Mideast, if not the best ally any nation has been blessed to have, ever. Recipient of nearly as much American foreign and military aid as the rest of the world combined, Israel, with its crack air force and large stockpile of nuclear weapons, stands unchallenged as the region’s dominant military power. Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu shows up on American news talk shows more than leaders of the rest of the world combined; were it not for John McCain, he would surely log more “Face the Nation” time than any American politician.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-middle-east-doesnt-matter/

Islamic State has no qualms about killing Kurds in Syria. Yet the organization has still managed to attract Kurdish supporters in Europe. In Hamburg, a number of families are struggling to cope with their sons' decisions to answer the call of jihad.

read more: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-attracts-kurds-from-germany-to-join-jihad-a-997062.html