...Dreams of My Sainted Father
came under fire Sunday from Republican politicians, who warned that a debacle in Iraq will give Islamist faceless myrmidons a staging area for "the next 9/11."
Senator
Lindsey Graham... the endangered South Carolina RINO...
, a proponent of U.S. air strikes, also called for the resignation of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
... Prime Minister of Iraq and the secretary-general of the Islamic Dawa Party. Maliki imposed order on Basra wen the Shiites were going nuts, but has proven incapable of dealing with al-Qaeda's Sunni insurgency. Reelected to his third term in 2014...
and direct U.S. engagement with Iran on the crisis set off this week by a lightning offensive by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
... the current version of al-Qaeda in Iraq, just as blood-thirsty and well-beloved as the original...
(ISIL) jihadist group.
Fighters from the group routed the much larger Iraqi army, seizing the country's second largest city djinn-infested Mosul
... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn...
and sweeping through the Sunni heartland towards Storied Baghdad.
The United States moved an aircraft carrier and two missile-guided warships into the Gulf on Saturday as Obama weighed his options.
Retired military officers questioned whether air strikes were a viable near-term option with no U.S. forces on the ground to provide precise targeting data.
| [Trailing wife's comment snipped by tw because it occurred to her it might harm someone real.] |
"I read someplace yesterday, where they're the richest terrorist group in the world after what they were able to seize in Mosul, so I'm concerned, and I think all Americans should be concerned," he told ABC's "This Week."
Graham, interviewed on CNN's "State of the Union," said Washington had to act "because Iraq and Syria combined are going to be the staging area for the next 9/11 if we don't do something about it."
"The people holding ground in Iraq also hold ground in Syria. Economic instability that comes from a collapsed Iraq will affect gas prices and our economic recovery," he said.
Another Republican politician, House Homeland Security chairman Michael McCaul, stopped short of calling for U.S. military action but pressed for an intensive diplomatic initiative with U.S. allies in the region to find a political solution involving Iraq's Sunni, Shia and Kurds.
"Without their cooperation against the faceless myrmidons this isn't going to happen. They're not going to do it on their own. They need us to lead them and we're not leading right now as a nation," he said on ABC's "This Week."
"This is the worst of the worst," he said of ISIL. "If they get back into the United States or western Europe, I see that as the biggest threat today."