America's 'Justified' Intervention in Iraq (O Globo, Brazil)
"The
creation of the caliphate, with its fundamentalist interpretation of Islam,
doesn’t only threaten Iraq, Syria, and the region. It threatens us all. It is
necessary to neutralize, while there is still time, the possibility of this
fundamentalist Sunni group spreading terrorism throughout the world."
The return of the U.S. military machine to Iraq, even if
only in the form of aerial bombardment, shows just how serious the situation
that has been created by the advance of the radical Sunni group the Islamic
State (formerly ISIL) has become. It now dominates a
broad swath of northeastern Syria and northern Iraq, where it has installed
what it calls a caliphate.
President Barack Obama fulfilled his promise to withdraw
American troops from Iraq at the end of 2011, and he didn't intend for them to
return. He resisted appeals to involve the U.S. militarily in Syria's civil
war, but now he needed to do something quickly, because beyond the Yazidi
and Shabak
minorities, IS threatens genocide against Iraq's Kurds and Christians. There
are about 100,000 refugees, 40,000 of which are experiencing hunger, thirst,
and suffer the heat of the mountains in northern Iraq. The choice given by the
IS is to convert to fundamentalist Islam or die.
The hope of thousands of people is in the humanitarian assistance dropped by
plane and the American bombing of IS positions. Official Iraqi sources have
revealed that IS militants have kidnapped hundreds of minority Yazidi women, who practice an ancient religion considered
heretical by the group.
Middle East conflicts are a redundancy, but what's going on
now is outside the norm. There are three underway. Iraq is on the edge of
disintegration, with its largest dam in the hands of IS. The Syrian civil war
has already lasted over three years. The country is destroyed, with the main
areas in the hands of IS and dictator Bashar
al-Assad. Israel and Hamas in their turn are waging the third war, which began
on August 8, with 1,890 Palestinians (430 children, 55 percent civilian) and 67
Israelis dead, and the latest cease fire has already been suspended.
With the exception of Tunisia, the movement to topple old
dictatorships in the Middle East, one day called the Arab Spring, has proven to
be a fiasco. In Egypt, after a brief period of control by the Muslim
Brotherhood, the army returned to dominate the country. and
in general restored the situation that prevailed for decades under Hosni
Mubarak. Post-Qaddafi Libya is a paradise for militias and the law of the
strong. In Syria, Assad resists, even murdering his own people.
Iraq was different: the changes were made by the Americans
from the outside in. It was inevitable that power would pass to the Shiite
majority, but the elected premier, Nouri al-Maliki, did the opposite of what
was expected, affirming in power the force of the Shiites, without making
concessions to include Sunnis and Kurds in government. Only now, facing the IS
advance, are there signs of unity against the common enemy.
Posted
By Worldmeets.US
The American intervention is justified. The creation of the
caliphate, with its fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, doesn’t only
threaten Iraq, Syria, and the region. It threatens us all. It is necessary to
neutralize, while there is still time, the possibility of this fundamentalist
Sunni group spreading terrorism throughout the world.
