The US government is now officially sending weapons dirctly to the Kurdish militias:
The U.S. government has begun to funnel weapons directly to Kurdish forces fighting Islamist militants in northern Iraq, U.S. officials said Monday, deepening American involvement in a conflict that the Obama administration had long sought to avoid.
The decision to arm the Kurds, via a covert channel established by the CIA, was made even as Pentagon officials acknowledged that recent U.S. airstrikes against the militants were having only a temporary deterrent effect and were unlikely to sap their will to fight.
“I in no way want to suggest that we have effectively contained, or that we are somehow breaking, the momentum of the threat,” said Army Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr., the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In a reflection of the administration’s reluctance to fight another full-fledged war in Iraq, Mayville said there are no plans to expand the limited air campaign, which President Obama ordered last week to prevent the massacre of Iraqi minorities and to protect U.S. military and diplomatic personnel in the northern city of Irbil.
………
In addition to the airstrikes, U.S. military officials have said they are conducting 50 to 60 reconnaissance flights a day over Iraq to get a clearer picture of the refugee crisis and movements by Islamic State fighters.
When the Gulf of Tonkin incident happened, I was just two years old, so I don’t know what that was like, but I my gut is feeling disturbing echoes.
What happens when (and it is when, not if) the first US pilot is shot down?
When I called Obama Bush with a Tan, I may have been wrong.
Perhaps a better analogy is that of LBJ, only with out the commitment to either social justice or civil rights.