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Unlike Libyan Jihadists and Mexican Drug Cartels, Obama Won’t “Break Law” to Provide Weapons to Kurds
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On August 7, 2014 @ 5:22 pm In The Point | 8 Comments
Obama is all about following the law… when it gives him an excuse to not do what he doesn’t want to do anyway. The rest of the time he does whatever he wants and claim it’s because Congress isn’t acting.
Smuggle weapons to Mexican drug cartels? He’s on it. Arm Libyan Jihadists? He got it done.
Arm the Kurds? Suddenly it’s against the law.
The law, much like Obama, seems to have come back from a long vacation just yesterday.
“There might not be a legal way for us to sell arms to the KRG [Kurdistan Regional Government],” Ollivant said. “The Kurds are finding out the hard way that there are huge structural barriers, totally independent of policy, being a sub-state unit.”
Though the Kurds have their own government and operate in a functionally autonomous region of northern Iraq, they still belong to the Iraqi state and are nominally accountable to the government in Baghdad. They have long advocated for full independence and the creation of their own sovereign state, but the U.S. has refused to back those efforts.
To get arms legally to the Kurds now, the U.S. military needs to send them through the central government in Baghdad.
“Foreign Military Sales and Foreign Military Financing must be coordinated with central government authorities,” said Cmdr. Smith, the Defense Department spokeswoman.
Sure, sure.
Just like arms to Libyan Jihadists were coordinated through Gaddafi. And Obama has gotten behind providing weapons to Muslim Brotherhood Jihadists in Syria… without running it past Assad.
If Obama needs inspiration, he can just pretend that the Kurds are law school students and the guns are birth control and Al Qaeda is Hobby Lobby.
But apparently we are providing munitions to the Kurds, while still insisting that weapons have to go through Baghdad. Even while Obama keeps pressuring the government in Baghdad to make concessions to the Sunnis, he’s also pressuring the Kurds to make concessions to Baghdad.
It’s not surprising that ISIS is winning.
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