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posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday September 24 2014, @01:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the death-from-above dept.

CNN reports:

American jets began bombing ISIS targets in Syria early Tuesday, raising U.S. involvement in the war-torn country and sending a forceful message to the terror group.

The airstrikes focused on the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, a U.S. official told CNN, though other locations were hit as well.

At least 20 targets in an[sic] around Raqqa were hit, the opposition group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

They're the first strikes against the terror group inside the country since President Barack Obama's announcement this month that he was prepared to expand the American efforts beyond targets in Iraq.

The Telegraph reports on comments from Tony Blair:

The former Labour Prime Minister has said air strikes would not be enough to defeat the jihadists who have taken control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria, sending in combat troops to fight Islamic State militants on the ground should not be ruled out.

[...] Speaking to the BBC, he said: "What I say is maybe having been through all of this, having faced these decisions in government and having faced the difficult choices in Iraq after 2003, and when the very type of terrorism that we're facing today we faced then, maybe it's worth appreciating the fact that there are lessons I have learnt from the experience of having gone through the process of taking these decisions, of having to deal with the situation in Iraq where, as I say, precisely the same type of terrorist forces we were facing in Iraq in 2006-07 is exactly what we face now in 2014."

Glenn Greenwald makes some observations:

The U.S. today began bombing targets inside Syria, in concert with its lovely and inspiring group of five allied regimes: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Jordan.

That means that Syria becomes the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by the 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate – after Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Iraq.

The utter lack of interest in what possible legal authority Obama has to bomb Syria is telling indeed: empires bomb who they want, when they want, for whatever reason (indeed, recall that Obama bombed Libya even after Congress explicitly voted against authorization to use force, and very few people seemed to mind that abject act of lawlessness; constitutional constraints are not for warriors and emperors).

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @07:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @07:11PM (#97837)

    It's because poor people are literally evil, and the enemy. If they weren't, they'd be wealthy Americans. You don't help evil. You don't help the enemy. You bomb them.

    You can't bomb the nation's poor and downtrodden, because they're still Americans, but you can still ignore them.