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Sunni/shia fight. every one of those circumstances, the sunnis on the rise groups like al qaeda and isis are saying, hey, those shia we re going after them. we want them out. rick francona as you know the u.s. embassy was evacuated, all americans got out of yemen several weeks ago. they quickly got out of there. but al qaeda of the arabian peninsula which represents according to u.s. terrorism analysts a major threat to the u.s. homeland they re trying to bomb planes if you will they still have their headquarters there in yemen. what, if anything, is the u.s. able to do in a situation like this now? well our capabilities have been severely degraded by losing the embassy there, losing our forward presence. the administration claims that they still have contacts with some people working in yemen, but it is really really hurt. and the aqap is a threat. they have the intent and the capability to do damage here. remember they put things on ....
Appointee. so the gridlock that we have now will only get worse. so this is politically, i think, a very dangerous development that has been created by congress and i think it s very bad implications for the future. going to be interesting to see how it all plays out because of this ruling. i also want to talk about the rapidly changing situation in iraq. now we have the governments of syria and iran entering into the conflict. how does this complicate things there? and does this change our strategy at all? i think it informs our strategy. it s very clear that this is a sunni/shia fight. and maybe a fight to the finish. right now, you ve got iran coming in because they support the maliki government. in fact, they support maliki much more than we do. so that s a huge contradiction that iran and the u.s. are both supporting the shia have supported maliki. but what it says to me is that the u.s. has to be sort of sober ....
Fight. when president obama announced today in a letter to congress that up to 275 american troops would be deploying back into iraq, 2 1/2 years after the last u.s. forces left there, this is the fight that he s sending them into. and this impossible geography for the fight between the sunnis and the shias with iraq sandwiched between sunni saudi arabia and sunni jordan on one side and shia iran on the other, and war-torn sunni majority but shia-led syria on yet another side, well, yeah, this impossible geography is the permanent tinderbox of the sunni/shia split in the middle east which is what the united states risked sparking by deciding to topple saddam hussein in 2003. especially when we made the decision to do that, to set this thing alight with zero plan as to what we would do next. there is not a history of ....
Syria, bashar al assad s regime, is a shiite sect called the alawites. so if we want to jump in, if the united states wants to jump back into iraq to go into this particular fight now, to go after these al qaeda aligned brutal sunni militants that have taken over swaths of iraq, we are going to be joining a fight that is already in progress. and that is not just internal to iraq. and our natural alliance in this fight will be us and the shia-dominated government of nuri al maliki in iraq which we installed after we toppled saddam, but also government of iran and also the government of bashar al assad in syria. that would be our side in this fight. boy, that s awkward. and in a larger strategic sense, that is basically impossible. i mean, it s impossible to see that alliance, that existing alliance in any sort of clear strategic sense for the united states or for anybody else in that group because it is not clear or necessarily strategic. it s just the facts of how the sides line up in ....
Clothes. nbc news has not been able to independently verify the videos. the videos are horrific. the group claims that they have killed 1,700 men in iraq. calls them dirty shias. while something undoubtedly terrible is going on in those videos, the iraqi government denies a massacre took place on that scale. whether or not the group did commit an atrocity that is as terrible as what they say they did, the reason that you go and post tweets about it and upload social media-ready videos about it rather than just do it is because you want an action like that to have more than just its direct military utility, right? you want to terrorize, you want to instill fear against anybody who might be thinking against fighting against you. you want populations to flee ahead of your advance. but you also want to provoke the world, right? you want to provoke a fight that is larger than the fight you are already having. this group that s taken over these big swaths of iraq, it is an offshoot of al qae ....