Yeah your numbers are a bit off http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22452.pdf Iraq is Operation Iraqi Freedom also keep in mind that all deaths of service members in country are counted those that are combat related and those that are not for example accidents and illness.Not saying that there is no significance to such deaths but it is a factor when the question is who in fact died due to enemy action.

The actual KIA number for Iraq is 3,481 http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf. if you add the Operation New Dawn KIA which is 38 as of today that is 3,519 total KIA.

Just to give some perspective in daily operations in the military deaths caused by accidents are not uncommon in the military in a good year the typical command will have 0 deaths caused by accident that is a very good year.Hell in just one year in my last unit in Germany just in my squadron there where 8 or 9 serious injuries.That was out of roughly 400 people give or take there is always some flux due to people PCSing and other things.

By comparison 34,080 people died in car accidents in the US in 2012.

No its just a normal way of business.
Skybird explains it quite well, though he omits the fact that his preferred alternative simply results in lots more wars as countries attempt to keep balancing their books.
Which logic suggests is a worse option than that currently practiced as the default option would become the one that he says is the possible current bad result
History gives many thousands of ugly examples of how his ideal solution works in practice.

It could however really work if there was a global dictatorship..... or if suddenly the human race changed and the whole world started singing a happy clappy Kum Ba Ya.
But a sane person must realise that the first is a very dangerous and certainly unwelcome idea.... and the second ain't ever going to happen.

By comparison how many hundreds of times were how many millions of people in a car in the US in 2012?
A comparison should be like for like.

Add to the losses on allied side the suicides of veterans, the mentally affected veterans, the non-physically wounded veterans who do not function in their home environment anymore and have lost their former private and social life and chances alltogether, not ticking in conformity with the social environment around them anymore. You then are deep in the 6 digit range.

Add the civilian casualties that got injured, killed, as a result of the country falling into chaos and 11 years of cataclysm now. You then have entered the 7 digit range.

Iraq is a failed state now. Afghanistan: failed as well.

Syria lost as well. Libya looks not good.

Muslim terrorism marching on all fronts, its veterans having started to drip back into Europe, causing risks rising here as well.

Al Sadr back in business, Maliki asking him for help. Al Sadr and Maliki. That alone tells something to the knowing.

Stupid and unscrupulous Washington and London bastards in 2003. Stupid, and unscrupulous. They should get executed, all politicians whop said yes back then. Every single bigmouthed political retard there has been.

I guess by now the Iraqis wish to have Saddam back....:/\\!!

Most certainly.

not really, Saddam was a Sunni. He had between 100,000 and 200,000 Shiites killed in spring 1991 alone.

During the "Surge", U.S. forces had defeated the precursur to ISIS, in part, by forming alliances with moderate Sunni leaders/groups in the Sunni provinces. The Maliki govt has squandered all that goodwill by systematically excluding Sunnis from the government and the Army.

Local support explains, in part, ISIS's success in Sunni areas:

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/orig...raqi-army.html

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/orig...#ixzz34QTsrhwr

Many in ISIS consider Shiites to be infidels:

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Mid...#axzz34QXth3C2

You will most likely see a bloodbath if ISIS manages to capture Baghdad.

Certainly not if you are Kurdish. They seem to be the only other group profiting from this debacle, as they just seized the oil-rich town of Kirkuk. But, then they probably never identified themselves as Iraqi either.

The Kurds should be okay. They have defensible terrain, have spent the past decade basically building their own army, and have every reason to defend their turf to the death. There is nowhere to fall back to for them; Turkey and Iran hate them.

The real problem is basically the rest of Iraq. The government and the army are both weak and divided. Meanwhile, the group seizing control is so hard core in their beliefs that even Al Queda disowned them.

Ah well, there's been a de facto civil war going on in Iraq for millennia. It will never end and any government on the planet would be nuts to get in the middle of it like the American coalition did.:stare:
Leave the sand fleas to do what they do best...kill each other.
Meanwhile, we'll just keep pumping out their oil via Kuwait.

It was a very big mistake that after the American had taken full control during the implementation of the occupation they destroyed all governmental and especially military structures in Iraq. They destroyed the security and intel apparatus as well and send scores and scores of men onto the street, jobless and without income.

With Malik the US supported a corrupt, nepotist politician who enver cared at all for any form of improving relations between Shia and Sunni and Kurds, and who spend his time with establishing a new torture and secret police apparatus that hunted Sunni opposition members and former members of the Baath party. Years ago their were reports saying that the situation regarding death squads and torture now was worse than it ever had been under Saddam. Sunni and Kurds were tried by Maliki to be left out of the distribution of financial income from oil business.

Finally, two years after the invasion the US equipped and armed Sunni tribes in West Iraq to make them allies in the fight against the first terror wave that just had swept across Iraq, and against Al Quaeda that tried to get a first foot in the door at that time. Indeed these tribes did that and kep Al Quaeda away for some time - and after Washington thought it had been successful enough a cooperation, it let them fall again and did not care anymore, once again sending thousands of angry young men without financial support onto the streets - this time well-armed young men.

It is these regions in Western Iraq where the "fundamentalists" now have come from, and from where they started their offensive.

After the war 1991, Washington had led tens of thousands of Shias to the slaughterbank when dropping support for them short time after it had called them to revolt against Saddam. Despite the ban on the air force, Saddam's helicopter force was allowed to fly, and it used the opportunity to commit a huge massacre amongst the Shia. Probably what Bush senior intended to secure his champion - Saddam - in power a bit longer: leaving him the option to kill the opposition that could endanger his power.

Nice record you have there, Washington. Ironically, Obama's strategy of pulling out from world affairs has completely backfired by now as well. I do not know whose foreign policy record is more disastrous: that of Bush or of Obama.


All this reflects back onto Israel's security situation as well, and stupid Westerners still argue that if only Israel would agree to destroy itself by allowing Palestinians to take it over, all would be good in the ME (since the civil war between Sunni and Shia powers is just a myth propagated by Islamophobes anyway). For them, this little piece (in German):


http://spiritofentebbe.wordpress.com...aeli-solution/


The author discusses why the two states solution is idiotic, the "peace process" is a Western self-deception, and that the one state solution is the only way. I fully agree.

The Iraqi government is requesting U.S. Air support against ISIS.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...r-strikes.html#

I hope Obama says no. It's the Iraqis mess now, they can deal with it.

I wonder. This wasn't simply a defeat, this was a rout. Iraqi security forces didn't fight at all, they simply fled. And they fled before a vastly inferior force. That doesn't happen unless you have a complete failure of leadership. Much as in the 1975 North Vietnamese Spring Offensive, when ARVN soldiers fled because they saw their corrupt officers flee, despite being lavishly equipped with US hardware. How do you stop that? Once the Iraqi army has already demonstrated to itself that it will crumble upon contact with the enemy, how do you then convince soldiers to fight?

Maybe they will for Baghdad where the lives of Shiite women and children will be on the line. You would think being on their home ground would change the dynamic. But I still wonder.

Of course, maybe it's way past time to admit there was never an Iraq at all. Just a group of squabbling tribes and religious factions contained by poorly drawn lines on a map. Could they eventually partition themselves by force?

The best organised, best-led and most disciplined forces in Iraq, are the Kurdish units in the North. But I think they are outnumbered - I am not certain on that, however.

I'd say let Great Britain fix it. They created this land named 'Iraq' after crushing the Ottoman Empire, and installed an (unliked) king.
:03:

Hey, if the Ottomans had stayed in their own backyard. :O: