Sunni Radical Insurgency in Iraq. North of Country Overrun.

[NotNow]

I am simply pointing out the massive incompetence to let years of American lives and treasure slip away.  This is a massive error in an administration with a long record of errors. 

Well at least you finally admit the Bush/Cheney junta was a disaster for the United States.

You are really Howard Dean, aren't you? 

[finehoe]

Bush's toxic legacy in Iraq

One of George W. Bush's most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship.

If this wasn't so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein's men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war.

After the fall of Hussein's regime, no documents were unearthed in Iraq proving the Hussein-al Qaeda axis despite the fact that, like other totalitarian regimes, Hussein's government kept massive and meticulous records.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had by 2006 translated 34 million pages of documents from Hussein's Iraq and found there was nothing to substantiate a "partnership" between Hussein and al Qaeda.

Two years later the Pentagon's own internal think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, concluded after examining 600,000 Hussein-era documents and several thousand hours of his regime's audio- and videotapes that there was no "smoking gun (i.e. direct connection between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda.)"

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded in 2008, as every other investigation had before, that there was no "cooperative relationship" between Hussein and al Qaeda. The committee also found that "most of the contacts cited between Iraq and al Qaeda before the war by the intelligence community and policy makers have been determined not to have occurred."

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/13/opinion/bergen-iraq-isis-bush/index.html?eref=edition

[NotNow]

topic title changed for accuracy. The original title misidentified the actual insurgency, which is ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and  the Levant)

Yep, accurate topic titles are important on this site. 

[NotNow]

Of course it is StephenDare!.  We all know what a stickler for accuracy you are.   

[BridgeTroll]

This may be workable...

[carpnter]

This may be workable...

They really should come up whit a better name for that eastern region.