Tuesday, September 10, 2014. Chaos and violence continue, reality continues to look bad, but Barack just knows he can spin it, and much more.


Wednesday night, US President Barack Obama gives an address on Iraq.

He will most likely note the aerial bombings the US and Iraq have carried out.

He may boast of alleged leaders killed -- leaders of the Islamic State -- but he won't note the civilian deaths.  He most likely won't note last Saturday's bombing of the hospital in Hawija.

Or the dead from that bombing.

Well the babies were premature.

Maybe Barack thought he was killing premature terrorists?

Barack won't note it.

He likely will ignore the points Reuters makes today as well:


  Kurdish and Shi'ite fighters have regained ground, but Sunni Muslims who fled the violence are being prevented from returning home and some have had their houses pillaged and torched.

Rather than help keep the nation together, the air strikes risk being used by different factions for their own advantage in Iraq 's sectarian and ethnic conflicts.

The fallout also risks worsening grievances that helped Islamic State find support amongst Iraq 's Sunnis, and allows the militant group to portray the U.S. strikes as targeting their minority sect. That may make it more difficult to bring Sunnis on side and convince them to fight the militants.


The bombings will most likely be presented as a 'strategy' and part of a 'mission' or 'plan.'

But they've been going on for some time and pretty much did what many feared.

Bobby Ghosh of Time magazine was the first one I heard point it out.  He was making the cable rounds back in June and he pointed out one of the problems with the US bombing anywhere in Iraq was that certain people could use the bombings as a means to destroy their rivals.


In Afghanistan in the early years of the Afghanistan War, the US government used to be so proud of how many terrorists they detained.

But they were usually farmers or herders, they weren't terrorists.

The same 'logic' that filled US overseas prisons and black ops with innocents is now being used to kill.

Barack won't admit that.

He probably will avoid the frankness Robin Wright (The New Yorker) offers:


Yesterday, more than four months after Iraq’s national elections, the country’s leaders finally formed a new government. Secretary of State John Kerry heralded it as a "major milestone," with "the potential to unite all of Iraq’s diverse communities for a strong Iraq." He said that the United States now stands "shoulder to shoulder with the Iraqis." President Obama called to congratulate the new Prime Minister, Haidar al-Abadi, after his government was sworn in.

The process almost imploded, however, when disgruntled Kurds threatened a last-minute boycott over Baghdad’s failure, since January, to provide the Kurds with their agreed upon seventeen per cent of Iraq’s oil revenues, leaving northern Kurdistan unable to pay provincial salaries or its peshmerga fighters. The government is also short of the two positions most pivotal to national security, since the squabbling factions can’t agree on a minister for defense or for the interior.


And that's the thing.

If Barack talks like John Kerry?

Some in the US may buy it but many outside the US will be laughing.


People say -- some people -- that next week will find Iraq filling the posts of Minister of the Interior and Minister of Defense.

Of course they said that in January 2011.

And Nouri didn't appoint anyone.

Went his whole term with both those posts (plus Minister of National Security) empty.

We stood alone in pointing that out.

We stood alone in noting that if the violence was increasing, maybe you fill the position of Minister of Defense.

It's not that complicated.

But Nouri was in the midst of a power grab and the White House saw their role as running interference for Nouri.

Barack probably won't discuss that in the speech either.

But Tim Arango did.  Monday, in an online discussion, this exchange took place.