Kobani.

Editor,

A hastily trained Iraqi army comprised of otherwise unemployed civilians wearing a uniform to get paid is no match for the justifiably embittered professional soldiers of Saddam's military that Paul Bremer brilliantly fired -- because they were Baathists -- after Saddam's statue was pulled to the ground.

The empire is always looking for client states' boots to train and send into the fray: Vietnam; Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua -- psychopathic torturers and death squads good at killing defenseless peasants there; Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. The beat goes on and on.

Kobani is Tora Bora redux. Why? Because the real objective is to defend Kurdish oil in Erbil. Let ISIS dig in along the Syrian border and fight them there for the next ten years. Just so long as they don't get their hands on Iraq's big oil fields in Kurdistan and Basra.

Kobani is a two-fer: endless war for the military-industrial complex and a Kurdish cushion for oil price war against Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. Remember: the Middle East is about oil. People are expendable. You just blow them up.

Re: "ISIS Keeps Up Pressure Near Baghdad as Iraqi Troops Stumble" (10/18/2014)