130 More U.S. Troops to Iraq...There's Always Going to be an Excuse - This is Classic

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13. did they not conflate ISIS/ISIL with al-Qaeda at the very beginning of direct action?

from the August 08, 2014 Background Briefing by Senior Administration Officials on Iraq

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: This is not something new. ISIL originally was the group led by Zarqawi and al Qaeda in Iraq, an organization we know very well. It’s important to keep in mind that ISIL is not a new phenomenon. It is al Qaeda in Iraq, and a part of the ideology which was spawned by Zarqawi all the way back in 2003. And to date, the largest terrorist attack ever in Iraq took place up in the Sinjar region in August of 2007, killing about 700 Yazidi civilians in a series of devastating car bombs then conducted by al Qaeda in Iraq.

It is their mission -- ISIL, and then al Qaeda in Iraq, same organization --

How deep and how far will the 'counterterrorism effort the President speaks of go?

from August 9, 2014, President Obama's statement on Iraq:

THE PRESIDENT: Now, there are some immediate concerns that we have to worry about. We have to make sure that ISIL is not engaging in the actions that could cripple a country permanently. There’s key infrastructure inside of Iraq that we have to be concerned about. My team has been vigilant, even before ISIL went into Mosul, about foreign fighters and jihadists gathering in Syria, and now in Iraq, who might potentially launch attacks outside the region against Western targets and U.S. targets. So there’s going to be a counterterrorism element that we are already preparing for and have been working diligently on for a long time now.

This is about more than Kurdish refuge on a mountain. Syrian Kurds have done more to move them off of those peaks than we have with our bombs . . .

Look at some of the "personnel and facilities" the President is talking about defending in Irbil

from McClatchy:

IRBIL, Iraq — A supposedly secret but locally well-known CIA station on the outskirts of Irbil’s airport is undergoing rapid expansion as the United States considers whether to engage in a war against Islamist militants who’ve seized control of half of Iraq in the past month.

Western contractors hired to expand the facility and a local intelligence official confirmed the construction project, which is visible from the main highway linking Irbil to Mosul, the city whose fall June 9 triggered the Islamic State’s sweep through northern and central Iraq. Residents around the airport say they can hear daily what they suspect are American drones taking off and landing at the facility.

Expansion of the facility comes as it seems all but certain that the autonomous Kurdish regional government and the central government in Baghdad, never easy partners, are headed for an irrevocable split _ complicating any U.S. military hopes of coordinating the two entities’ efforts against the Islamic State.

. . . U.S. officials have known for some time that it was likely that they’d need to coordinate any steps it takes both in Baghdad and in Irbil, where the Peshmerga has worked closely over the years with the CIA, U.S. special forces and the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s most secretive task force, which has become a bulwark of counterterrorism operations. Peshmerga forces already are manning checkpoints and bunkers to protect the facility, which sits just a few hundred yards from the highway . . .

So it's just a temporary defense of the Kurdish territory? Or, something more enduring?

Oil at the Center of Reason U.S. Has Launched Airstrikes in Iraq?

The New Republic ‏@tnr The Real Reason the U.S. Has Launched Airstrikes in #Iraq: Oil. http://on.tnr.com/1pJEEn3

There are American consular personnel in Erbil, but they could be evacuated if necessary. What Obama left unsaid was that Erbil, a city of 1.5 million, is the capital of the Kurdish regional government and the administrative center of its oil industry, which accounts for about a quarter of Iraq’s oil. The Kurds claim that if they were to become an independent state, they would have the ninth-largest oil reserves in the world. And oil wells are near Erbil.

If the Islamic State were to take over Erbil, they would endanger Iraq’s oil production and, by extension, global access to oil. Prices would surge at a time when Europe, which buys oil from Iraq, has still not escaped the global recession. Oil prices have already risen in response to the Islamic State’s threat to Erbil, and on Thursday, American oil companies Chevron and Exxon Mobile began evacuating their personnel from Kurdistan. But oil traders are predicting that American intervention could halt the rise. “In essence we find U.S. air strikes more bearish than bullish for oil as the act finally draws a line for IS and reinforces both the stability in south Iraq and in Kurdistan,” Oliver Jakob, a Swiss oil analyst, told Reuters.

In portraying American intervention in Iraq as a purely humanitarian effort, Obama is following the script he read from in Libya, when he justified American intervention as an effort to prevent a massacre in Benghazi. In a March 28, 2011 address to the nation, Obama painted the American intervention as a response to “brutal repression and a looming humanitarian crisis.” Oil was not mentioned, even though Libya was the world’s sixteenth-largest oil producer in 2009 and a major supplier to Europe. But oil was most likely involved, as became clear when, after preventing a massacre in Benghazi, the United States and its coalition partners stuck around to topple the regime of Muammar Qaddafi. If the Obama administration wanted to prevent the world’s peoples from brutal dictators and repressive regimes or from takeovers by terrorist groups, there are other countries besides Libya and Iraq where it could intervene. What distinguishes these two countries is that they are major oil producers . . .