Opinion Piece: Iraq Is A Non Event

This week the markets got a real surprise on Tuesday as Islamists terrorist called ISIS attacked 30,000 Iraqi troops in four major cities and made the Iraqi troops run back to their mothers despite being only at the most 2000 strong in number, these terrorists are hardened zealots who would love nothing more than to die for God. I have spent the last two days researching this event to see how critical it is and whether we should go to cash or not and I learned an interesting thing this morning. Basically what the true mission of these 2000 fighters is to do is for them to actually rob banks in the cities they captured, so they could send the money back to the ISIS network that is probably low on cash. It has been reported that they took about $480 million from the banks in these cities so far.

Now they tried to attack the Kurdish army in the North but unfortunately the Kurds did not run like the US Trained and equipped army of Iraq did and successfully defeated the ISIS forces as the Kurdish Army is 170,000 strong. Despite their willingness to die, an army of 1700 terrorists can not eventually win over a 170,000 Kurdish Army, a 300,000 Iraqi Army and The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Iran sent two battalions of Iranian Revolutionary Guards to help the Iraqi government in its battle against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is hugely important, if not totally surprising given Iran's intervention in Syria. Iran has the power to crush ISIS in open combat as these aren't just any old Iranian troops. They're Quds Force, the Guards' elite special operations group. The Quds Force is one of the most effective military forces in the Middle East, a far cry from the undisciplined and disorganized Iraqi forces that fled from a much smaller ISIS force. One former CIA officer called Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani "the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today." Suleimani, the Journal reports, is currently helping the Iraqi government "manage the crisis" in Baghdad. For those who don't know how big a battalion is, it is anywhere from 300 to 1200 men, so the Iran's alone sent in 600 to 2400 men or special forces that alone could do the job. 

The mistake the Obama Administration made is that they took 100% of all US forces out of Iraq. We defeated German and Japan in 1945 but we still keep bases there so radical groups can not take this kind of action at will. When we left Vietnam, it took the Viet Cong no time at all to take over Vietnam. Had he just kept one division of US Marines there or about 20,000 soldiers in a permanent base in Iraq, this would have never happened, but when Politicians make military decisions then you run into these types of problems. 

What will probably happen now is that the US will send in air power to clean this mess up but no ground troops. I still don't know what kind of air power the US is going to send but if it a division of Apache Helicopters then these terrorists will be running back to where they came from, very quickly as an Apache Helicopter uses infrared technology and heat seeking armaments to identify targets from a mile away and can destroy a target the size of a mail box with pin point accuracy. The ISIS terrorists are riding around in old pick up trucks, so it should be no problem at all to neutralize the targets if such action is necessary. 

Panic has spread though out the global markets as no one has decided to investigate that this whole event is just one big bank robbery. Baghdad has a population of 4 million people and I very much doubt that 2000 rebel terrorists can seize and control the city. The Iraq Army has 300,000 soldiers and 560,000 reservists so at worst case scenario its a 150:1 ratio in favor of the Iraqi Army. Here is a very informative video from CNBC that explains it all.

So basically what we have here is the equivalent of 1700 street gang members from Compton in Los Angeles trying to take over California. This to me is a non event because 1700-2000 terrorist are there just to rob banks and fund the ISIS Terrorist Network. Once they get $1 billion or so in cash they will pick up and go home. The real danger is that they will use that $1 billion to form terrorist networks to do damage here in the US. Politicians making military decisions have created 90% of the problems the world has today. Had we left just one division of Marines there in Iraq in a permanent base, the terrorist would not have gotten their hands on $1 billion in seed money. That is my biggest fear.