122 views and 2 responses.....I guess nobody else here thinks that that this is good news.
I wonder why??? hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

They can see the "light at the end of the tunnel."
Only a few more Friedman Units till its all over.

I think is very simplistic and even insulting to say: "We can only be terrorized if we give into to that fear."

People being shot and killed at a Christmas party by islamist terrorists who became radicalized after they started becoming more religious requires a better response than 'don't be afraid, it's only a bad few' (this after Paris, the Boston Marathon and many other countries which are now in shambles because of radical islam).

If you chose to live in fear because the news of the attacks were carried by the national media day after day, that that is your decision, but don't call it insulting when I bring it to your attention.

Afraid is exactly what ISIS and other terrorist groups (not to mention Republican politicians) want you to be. If you want to play into their hands, again that is your decision to make. If you are still in fear after reading, be courageous. Courage is not lack of fear, but the act of overcoming fear.

The guy got into an argument at a work party, felt insulted, went home, got his gun, and killed ONLY his coworkers at the party. No use of the pipe bombs in the apartment, no murdering any one of the HUNDREDS of other unarmed people there, including people that they walked past. Islamic terrorism might, indeed, have been on the agenda, but it looks like it was hardly item number one.

More related to your post: if the FBI is correct and they "were radicalized" in 2012 or before, then ISIS clearly had nothing to do with it, since they were neither an international organization nor known outside Northern Iraq until early 2014/late 2013. The guy was born and raised in Illinois and was about as American as you can get, just like the Colorado Springs religious terrorist from the same week; we should hardly be worried about some revolution in Iraq.

I'm sorry if you feel insulted by pointing out the obvious: terrorists' sole aim is to cause terror. If, then you feel terror, then the terrorists have achieved their aim. Lots of modern countries have endured far longer, more intense periods of terrorism, yet the populace wasn't arming themselves in fear and obsessing on cable news.

....two years before with the guy who bought the 2 assault rifles for him and that those two rifles were used in the assault on the Christmas party. And how about the fact that they had 20 pipe bombs laying around the house and planted others at the scene of the party which failed go off because they had faulty remote detonation devices. And how about the wife who went on social media and declared her allegiance to ISIS (the terror organization du jour) right before the attack. And how many guys can go to a party and come home and say to his wife, "This guy ticked me off. Let's grab our AR-15's and a few bombs, drop the baby off at my mother's house, and go shoot up the party" - and wife who is the mother of an infant says, "Hell yea! Let's do it now!

There is little doubt they were planning a terror attack. Maybe they switched their target at the last minute after the argument, but that couple was a time bomb ready to blow and that bomb would have gone off sooner or later, probably sooner because their planning was evidently complete.

If he DID plan other attacks, two years before, then that was before ISIS existed in its modern form and therefore he was not radicalized in response to anything ISIS did.

Everything else you say is true, 100%. It absolutely was a terrorist attack.

However, it is very, very odd that this particular terrorist attack was also apparently an incidence workplace violence. It would be like finding out Mohammad Atta had been fired from his job at the World Trade Center on September 10. There's certainly nothing to indicate that, although an attack was planned, that this attack was planned, and that makes it weird.

(One edit: now she may or may not have been online posting admiration for the leader of ISIS. Even if she did, it was damn sure weird that she'd use an alias and only use that account once, for one sentence.

Tell us what you think instead throwing out passive aggressive posts.

And sound just like the republicans sounded when Bush told us the surge worked, and we were making progress.

One classic symptom of authoritarian personalities is that they change their viewpoints on issues depending on who is in charge. IMO it's better to have principles than idols.

Last edited Mon Dec 28, 2015, 10:45 PM - Edit history (3)

...being happy with the fact that extremely evil force in the world is one more small step closer to be eliminated, you have a very weird perspective indeed.

I for one am happy that this is good news for the Obama administration which has pursued a course of refusing to get us re-involved in the Middle East mess created by W and his cronies more than is absolutely necessary and because it is a rebuke of Republican politicians who would have us involved again up to our eyeballs.

And by the way, I wrote the original article and I do not have an authoritarian personality; nor do I change my viewpoints based on who is in charge. Be careful who you insult.

And I get it - you don't like war - I served in my country's military and I can assure you that I hate it far worse than you ever can. I would love to live in a world were war is obsolete. That is a certainly a worth while goal. But I live in the real world where war is often a fact of life and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it because we have not yet eliminated countless centuries of animosity. I like would like to pretend that all of that didn't exist, but most of us can't afford to live in your fantasy world.

What are you implying?

It had only been up half an hour when you posted. I sorta think it's good news, but frankly I take all news from the Middle East with a big pinch of salt, good or bad, because individual events are rarely a good indivaotr of long-term trends in the region. So I don't think ISIS is quite the existential crisis some make it out to be, but on the other hand I don't think a setback like this is a good indicator that ISIS will soon be defeated.

but holding onto it is quite another.

Works both ways, I guess.

One of the first steps the US took in 2014 was to try to persuade Iraq to use the recent election results to form a more inclusive government where there could be hope that the Sunnis would not be excluded - as happened under Maliki. Though the government initially said many things that were right, this is the first news that suggests that they have really acted on that. If Sunnis are joining against ISIS -- that is a huge very big deal.


Do you write the blog that you linked to?

There is not one of them fit to take over for Obama.

Remember that day!!!

base. Their campaign sound bite about Obama's plan to deal with ISIS will not change in response to actual events.

I hope they can keep it. I'm going to have to go see which part of the Iraqi Army managed this, because frankly, many of the troops are terrible soldiers.

It would be surprising to see them take or defend anything. And that is Sunni territory, part of Saddam's old regime.

There are some documentaries and the troops shown are well.....idiots. The difference between them and the Kurds is astonishing. High, belligerent, wasting ammo, shooting at nothing, and the corruption is nuts.

I guess it's rerun season.

I expect such idiocy at freeperville, which is why I don't go there

.... but it is utterly stupid to allow ISIS to establish a safe haven from which to operate.

Understand that ISIS was not allowed to prosper because of President Obama's war. He is like the guy following the circus parade with a broom trying to clean up the elephant poo. Not a fun job, but someone has to do it when you follow an idiot in the Presidency.

Vladimir Putin and his well-disciplined and expert armed forces....but there will be no recognition of that fact on this website, nor in the media. Because the truth hurts when you've been fed lies since Reagan and believed them.

....do with the taking of Ramadi.

I'm not sure we've been briefed on that. Not the first time, either:

Remember the Kuwait ambassador's daughter who testified to Congress she was a nurse back in 1991?



She "pretended" to work at a Kuwaiti City hospital where she saw the invading Iraqi soldiers take babies from their incubators and leave them on the cold, hard floor to die -- just so they could steal the incubators for Baghdad and provide her with an excellent opportunity to commit perjury.

http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html

What her daddy, the Kuwaiti ambassador, said: "If I wanted to lie, or if we wanted to lie, if we wanted to exaggerate, I wouldn't use my daughter to do so. I could easily buy other people to do it."

Of course, even then, it seems George H.W. Bush couldn't drum up much support for war for oil. He then started calling Saddam "Hitler" and stating he had WMDs, specifically nukes, aimed at Washington and Detroit and who knows where else. All lies, of course.

... made in the past. This is about correcting one of the results those mistakes - ISIS.

Eight years ago big media told us the surge worked. Here they are again. Election year - time to wave those flags and for God sake, don't vote for anyone who doesn't support endless war.

My point is that if the success against ISIS continues it is a total repudiation of those Republican politicians who are trying to scare the hell out of the American people and in the process get us further involved in the mess they created in Iraq.

But a BFD.

To a few hundred ISIS fighters, no less. We watched on surveillance drones while ISIS used bulldozers to enter government compounds, and basically shrugged it off at the time, minimal airstrikes conducted--even Gen. Dempsey said losing Ramadi wouldn't be a huge concern last spring, before it fell. We didn't seem to care enough about it to help Iraq hang on to it to begin with. Now Iraq, the WH, State and Pentagon want to trumpet this as a win? LOL.

As you will recall we didn't have much to do with the loss of Ramadi. The Iraqi army was first destroyed by the Bush administration approved De-Ba'athification strategy and then rendered impotent by Maliki's political meddling and his appointment incompetents to position of military leadership. At Ramadi, though they possessed vastly superior numbers, equipment, and firepower, the Iraqi army dropped their weapons and fled at their first taste of combat against ISIS fighters. (By the way those ISIS fighters were commanded by former Sunni leaders of the Iraqi army who were purged by the Iraqi Shia lead government during their De-Ba'athification expulsions.)

So yes, it is a big deal when better lead and trained Iraqi forces were able to rout the ISIS defenders in Ramadi. For a long while I thought that only the Kurds had the backbone and will power to oppose ISIS on the battlefield in Iraq. The fact that the Iraqi army not only returned to Ramadi, the site of their biggest embarrassment, but were also victorious bodes well for President's Obama's strategy of the minimal involvement of US ground personal. Not only does it minimize American casualties, but it also denies ISIS the recruiting tool of advertising that they are fighting hand to hand with the hated Americans.

It wasn't a Mosul type collapse, which was a surprise for pretty much everyone. This time they didn't turn and run at the first sign of trouble--rather, it was the last in a string of losses in that province, and then they retreated. But we saw that they were struggling to hold on for weeks, and we didn't exactly pour on the help or instill a sense of urgency to hold that city. The real question is, why were we and Iraq still losing large cities to ISIS a full year after the fall of Mosul and nine months after airstrikes and advisors? There's no excuse. All we're doing now is correcting a big failure that didn't have to happen--just prolonged the war.

40% of the territory ISIS conquered has been lost. They can't state with any legitimacy that they their caliphate will ultimately consist of most of the Middle East when they can't even hang on to the land they have already conquered. If this trend continues, and we will see if it does, their entire self proclaimed reason for existence will be open to serious question.

They are like Donald Trump - they can brag that they are winners as long as they are winning - but when they start to lose day after day - not so much.

the WH, State, or Pentagon, or their media cheerleaders/critics. The war effort was essentially placed on the back burner/low simmer in the spring and summer, until Russia got involved in Syria and started making overtures to Iraq--then all of a sudden we decided we needed to show some progress, because that's OUR turf, dammit! It's all a fucking joke. Now we're strutting around bragging about 10,000 Iraqi army personnel dislodging 400 fighters. We could have wiped these guys out far more quickly than we have. I was and am a believer in the air war, minimal US ground personnel needed, but we allowed the effort to erode to the point that many of our coalition partners sorta quit, Iraqis were suspicious that we were actually trying to HELP ISIS, and the use of ground troops was being declared necessary by various idiots. Just completely mismanaged--or was it on purpose? It's nice that we're back to where we were last April, though. Yay.

Whether you respect my opinion or not is truly not one of my concerns.

Future events will prove one of us right and one of us wrong - no offense and nothing personal, but I hope that it is you that is wrong.

It is irrelevant that our strategists didn't feel moving against Daesh sooner would advance our regional goals as much as not. Apparently details of ISIS's retreat from Ramadi make it clear to observers that they are really leaving. News to us but not to those who helped them to that "decision." And their retreat from there is only part of a much larger abandonment of territories they can no longer hold onto.

And, of course, try telling the people of Iraq and Syria, as well as all those Daesh threatens in the region, that that's not a really big deal.

Bye