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Great new book-Black Flags by Joby Warrick


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2016 Apr 29, 12:30pm   2,550 views  0 comments

by bob2356   ➕follow (1)   💰tip   ignore  

Far and away the best book on the Iraq insurgency and how it led to the rise of ISIS I've read so far. The amount of research and depth of research is amazing.

For GWB fans I must sadly say the book extensively documents how truly incompetent the entire GWB administration was. Simply pathetic that a semi literate jordanian high school dropout was able to effortlessly execute far better strategy than the entire us government for 6 years. Obama didn't distinguish himself with strategic thinking either, but in his defence he was picking up the pieces from 6 years of disaster. It's very doubtful anything short of nuclear war or a wwII level commitment of troops that anything could have prevented the rise of isis by the time obama took office. Things were just too far gone and isis was too well supported by the disenfranchised sunni's of iraq that bush spent 6 years totally pissing off.

The book totally destroys the bush wasn't warned about going into iraq bullshit. The kings of jordan and saudi arabia both told bush to his face in the strongest of terms invading iraq would be a disaster leading to destabilizing the middle east. Interesting that this didn't come out in the US press even to this day.

The book also semi destroys the bush lied meme. Actually bush, and even more so cheney, didn't lie. Instead they refused to accept any intelligence that didn't agree with what what they wanted the intelligence to say. Example: cheney was briefed to an entire day by the top cia people that zarqawi did not visit iraq before 9/11, was not in contact with al queda after he did leave afghanistan, and had not been in contact with the iraq government. Cheney ignored this totally and allowed colin powell to make a total fool out of himself at the UN.

Even more sadly the cia had a team observing zarqawi for 6 months when he has organizing his training camp in northern iraq before the invasion. The cia team begged for months for a spec ops raid since they had almost all of the fundamentalist jihadists (the very people who went on to become the insurgency) in the entire middle east sitting in one place ready to be bagged. The response from the bush administration was we are too busy with preparing for the invasion to be bothered. Incredible. The real irony is the us no fly zone over the kurdish territories where zarqawi established his operation gave zarqawi the protection he needed to prevent the iraq security services/army from taking him and his camp out.

If zarqawi hadn't foolishly executed a terrorist attack on jordan, which got jordan's very very good security service involved to locate him and give the us the information to take him out, the us would still be looking for him.

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