"Presuming ISIS is ever defeated, no peace can be sustained if Iraqis aren�t committed to preserving it."

Key line in a NYT editorial.

I think it means: There's no point in defeating ISIS.

"Pentagon report predicted West�s support for Islamist rebels would create ISIS."

"Anti-ISIS coalition knowingly sponsored violent extremists to 'isolate�' Assad, rollback 'Shia expansion.'"

Bob Woodward: Bush did not lie about WMD in Iraq.

Today, on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Bob Woodward about the questions the GOP candidates have been getting about Iraq: Was the 2003 invasion a mistake? Woodward answered:

[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don't let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.

Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but "A lot of people think he really didn't want to keep any troops there." Woodward agrees that Obama didn't want to keep troops there and elaborates:
Click for more �

"Residents � supporters and opponents of President Bashar al-Assad � described officers fleeing, leaving civilians and lowly conscript soldiers to fend for themselves."

"One business owner said he watched pro-government militiamen run helter-skelter into orchards, not sure where to retreat. 'Treason,' he called it. But most of all, they said, they had lost any sense that the government could provide safety even to its loyalists. On Thursday, after the militants had taken over the city and begun executing people they deemed close to the government, many residents cowered in their houses and basements, terrified of militants in the streets and of government shelling and airstrikes from the sky. Some found it ominous that the state news media had incorrectly declared that most civilians had been evacuated, perhaps an excuse to increase airstrikes."

From "Frantic Message as Palmyra, Syria, Fell: 'We're Finished'" (NYT).

Elsewhere in the NYT (on the same day, May 21st): "Defending ISIS Policy, Obama Acknowledges Flaws in Effort So Far."

"There�s no doubt that in the Sunni areas, we�re going to have to ramp up not just training but also commitment, and we better get Sunni tribes more activated than they currently have been," Mr. Obama said. "So it is a source of concern."

"Many questions will now be asked in Damascus and Baghdad � and above all in Washington..."

"... about how the militants have managed to score major advances in both Iraq and Syria this week despite all the efforts to stop them. IS was supposed to be on the defensive in Iraq, where the prime minister announced weeks ago the launching of a campaign to drive the militants out of Anbar province. Now he's lost its capital, Ramadi, just days before they took Palmyra in Syria. The western coalition's bombing campaign has clearly hurt IS where it could. But it could never compensate for ground forces which are not competent, equipped or motivated enough to stand firm and hit back. nly the Kurds in the north of both countries (most recently in north-eastern Syria) have proven able to do that."

From the BBC report "Islamic State seizes Syria's ancient Palmyra."

How ISIS used a sandstorm.

"The sandstorm delayed American warplanes and kept them from launching airstrikes to help the Iraqi forces, as the Islamic State fighters evidently anticipated."

The fighters used the time to carry out a series of car bombings followed by a wave of ground attacks in and around the city that eventually overwhelmed the American-backed Iraqi forces.

Once the storm subsided, Islamic State and Iraqi forces were intermingled in heavy combat in many areas, making it difficult for allied pilots to distinguish friend or foe, the officials said. By that point, the militants had gained an operational momentum that could not be reversed....

IN THE COMMENTS: SJ said: "It's hard to fight a war without putting soldiers on the ground in the area. Airplanes are useful, but they can't win a war by themselves." Surfed said: "Right out of the 1965 operational playbook of North Vietnamese General Vo Giap. Get close and intermingle in combat - it negates America's strengths in airpower and artillery. One place - Ia Drang Valley."

"They should ask [Hillary], 'Was it a good idea to invade Libya? Did that make us less safe? Did it make it more chaotic? Did it allow radical Islam and ISIS to grow stronger?'"

Said Rand Paul, as part of his answer to this week's Question of the Week on this morning's "Meet the Press":

CHUCK TODD: Are you satisfied after Governor Bush's sort of fourth answer on this, saying that he wouldn't have gone into the war in Iraq, knowing what we know now?...

SENATOR RAND PAUL: Well, I think it's an important question and I don't think it's a historical  anecdote. I don't think it's something that's a hypothetical question. I think it's a recurring question in the Middle East. Is it a good idea to topple secular dictators? And what happens when we do? I think when Hussein was toppled, we got chaos. We still have chaos in-- in Iraq. I think it emboldened Iran. I think-- we now have the rise of radical Islam in Iraq as well. But I think the same question, to be fair, ought to be asked of Hillary Clinton, if she ever takes questions. They should ask her, "Was it a good idea to invade Libya? Did that make us less safe? Did it make it more chaotic? Did it allow radical Islam and ISIS to grow stronger?" So I think the war in Iraq is a good question and still a current question, but so is the question of, "Should we have gone into Libya?"

"The Yazidi woman watched as her name was drawn out of a hat."

"Then a man she had never met told her to go into the bathroom and clean herself. But she knew better. As a Yazidi woman captured by the Islamic State, she knew that a bath was often prelude to rape. So she swallowed some poison and hoped to die."

From "Islamic State�s �war crimes� against Yazidi women documented," in the Washington Post.

Also:

Islamic State makes no secret about its enslavement of Yazidi women. In October, the group boasted about the practice in its English-language magazine, Dabiq.

�After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations,� the magazine said, arguing that unlike Christians and Jews, Yazidis, as polytheists, could be treated as property. �The enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers.�

Video appears to show ISIS militants destroying what is left of Nimrud, a kingdom from 900-612 B.C.

"In the video, militants use drills, sledgehammers and a bulldozer to destroy ancient stone reliefs and walls, before huge explosions can be seen...."

In the video, militants say "God has honored us in the Islamic State to remove all of these idols and statutes worshiped instead of Allah in the past days" and "Whenever we seize a piece of land, we will remove signs of idolatry and spread monotheism."

ADDED: More pictures (and video) here. 

"Look, I love art. I work in the arts. I cherish world monuments, and have traveled to see them."

"Why are you promoting the use of force to save things, while the slaughter of innocents and the destruction and displacement of their communities have not moved you to such action?"

Comment at a NYT op-ed titled "Use Force to Stop ISIS� Destruction of Art and History."

"Jeb, or '45,' as he is already being called, hasn�t even announced, and we�re already trapped in the byzantine psyche of Bushworld."

Writes Maureen Dowd.

[H]e�s being yanked in a tug of war between his father�s side, which insists privately that Jeb is a realist who surely must have disapproved of the Iraq invasion, and his brother�s side, which publicly demands that Jeb go full-hawk, becoming the third Bush to use the military in Iraq....
Though Jeb is more apt to do his homework, he�s unformed on foreign policy, like his brother � except that his brother was elected before 9/11. Now the neocons who treated W. like a host body for their own agenda are swirling around Jeb, ready to inhabit another President Bush....

ISIS endeavors to destroy the art of ancient Nineveh (AKA Mosul).

The efforts at destruction that you see at the beginning of this video are not as horrible as they look, for reasons that are explained half way through.

Watch out for the British expert who appears at 1:47. She thinks it's "pretty rotten for the people who actually live" in northern Iraq that so many of the original works of art have been transferred to Western museums � even as it's apparent that if those sculptures had been left in northern Iraq, they would now be sledgehammered to bits. Or does she � do we � think that if the artworks had been left in place, the history of Iraq would have played out on a different path, and the people who live there would have treasured and protected the world's artistic heritage? From the article at the link (to the British Channel 4 site):

The demolition squad of the Islamic State are following in the tradition of the Taliban who blew up the Buddhas at Bamyan, in Afghanistan, and the Malian jihadi group Ansar al Dine which destroyed mud tombs and ancient Islamic manuscripts in Timbuktu. They quote suras from the Koran that they say demand the destruction of idols and icons.

But iconoclasm isn't just a Salafi Islamic idea. In the 17th Century, puritans, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, destroyed Catholic holy objects and art in Britain.

"We pulled down two mighty great angells, with wings, and divers other angells . . . and about a hundred chirubims and angells," wrote William Dowsing, Cromwell's chief wrecker, after leading his henchmen into Peterhouse college chapel in Cambridge in December 1643.

Iconoclasm. If you're inclined to reach back into history, you will, perhaps, find it everywhere. From the Wikipedia article "Iconoclasm," here are "The Sons of Liberty pulling down the statue of George III of the United Kingdom on Bowling Green (New York City), 1776":



And I can't look at that and not think about the statue of Saddam Hussein that our military tore down in Bagdhad in April 2003. And what of all those monumental statues of Vladimir Lenin that came in for destruction when the Soviet Union dissolved. Would you like to see them all removed?

I know there's at least one still standing, because the NYT, just a couple days ago, ran a story cooing over an aging American couple who are using Airbnb to live in various European cities and the slideshow features the man, dressed in shorts, like a child, and standing, like a child, knee-high to "this statue of Lenin in Lithuania." The hand of the smiling child-man reaches out to encircle the index finger of Soviet dictator. In another photo, the woman, in a short skirt, poses at the feet of a giant Stalin. This one too is "in Lithuania." We're told there's "a sculpture garden." Isn't that nice?

I need to do my own research to find out about "Grutas Park (unofficially known as Stalin's World...)... a sculpture garden of Soviet-era statues and an exposition of other Soviet ideological relics from the times of the Lithuanian SSR."

Founded in 2001 by entrepreneur Viliumas Malinauskas, the park is located near Druskininkai, about 130 kilometres (81 mi) southwest of Vilnius, Lithuania.... Its establishment faced some fierce opposition, and its existence is still controversial.... The park also contains playgrounds, a mini-zoo and cafes, all containing relics of the Soviet era. On special occasions actors stage re-enactments of various Soviet-sponsored festivals.

So there's an alternative to iconoclasm.