McCain's head will explode [View all]

[alsame]

Petraeus: U.S. Must Not Become the Shia Militia's Air Force

The former commander of coalition forces in Iraq warned against getting embroiled in a long-running religious battle and noted Baghdad's government needed to be seen as fair by all Iraqis.


LONDON, England — David Petraeus, the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, has issued a stark warning to those advocating U.S. military intervention against ISIS militias bearing down on Baghdad.

The architect of the successful “surge” strategy that helped to quell the last great outbreak of sectarian violence in Iraq almost a decade ago said there was a great risk that the U.S. would be seen as picking sides in a religious battle that has been waged for generations.

The former head of the CIA and one of the most highly respected generals in modern U.S. warfare said it was only wise to offer military support if the political conditions were exactly right in Iraq, a scenario that is virtually impossible to imagine in the near-future. “This cannot be the United States being the air force for Shia militias, or a Shia on Sunni Arab fight,” he said.

<snip>

“The surge in Iraq, the surge that mattered most was not the surge in forces it was the surge of ideas that changed our strategy,” he said. “You cannot have 18 to 20 percent of the population feeling disenfranchised; feeling that it has no stake in the success of the country, in fact it has a stake in the failure of Iraq. Of course we reached out to the Sunni Arabs.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/18/petraeus-u-s-must-not-become-the-shia-militia-s-air-force.html


McCain has been whining all over TV that Obama must send him back to fix things and re-win the war we already won