U.S. officials: Arab states have offered to fly airstrikes against Islamic State in Iraq

[morningfog]

PARIS — Several Arab states have offered to fly airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq alongside the efforts of the United States, U.S. officials said Sunday.

“A lot of them” offered to do airstrikes, a senior State Department official said in Paris.

The military side of the widening campaign against the Islamic State is being coordinated by the U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM. U.S. officials would not identify which nations made offers of active battlefield participation, or “kinetic action,” in military parlance.

“A lot of this is still in the discussion phase, but I want to be clear that there have been offers, both to CENTCOM and to the Iraqis, of Arab countries taking more aggressive kinetic action against ISIL,” including airstrikes, the official said, using an alternative acronym for the militant network.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kerry-airstrikes-against-islamic-state-would-be-deconflicted-with-syria/2014/09/14/b9092b22-3c0f-11e4-b03f-de718edeb92f_story.html

[PragmaticLiberal]

1. Good. This is everyone's fight.

[Thinkingabout]

2. Good News, many Arab countries realize how horrible this group is.

I would think their options will go away with a worldwide fight. We also need them to influence the nations on the fence.

[RobertEarl]

3. Let them have at it

We can retreat. I like it.

Of course the first approval must come from the government's upon whose lands and people the bombs will drop.

Iraq govt. has demanded that its troops stop shelling their own cities, so that is a precedent, in that that requirement is also directed as US shelling, for sure.

But what I look for, is, at what point does the shelling end? That is the first item of diplomacy that must be laid on the table, before, as will surely happen, the forces that are using America supplied weapons refuse to pick them up again.

[grahamhgreen]

4. Good

[quadrature]

5. when the first school or hospital gets blown up ...

there is going to be trouble

[GeorgeGist]

6. I smell BS.

“A lot of them” offered to do airstrikes, a senior State Department official said in Paris.

[morningfog]

9. Not unlike Palin reading "all of them."

No names yet. No flights yet. And still no one but the US on record for bombing Syria.

[Romulox]

7. It's a real "Coalition of the Willing"!!!! nt

[Ichingcarpenter]

8. kinetic action,”...... boy that's a new one for bombing

Kinetic

The military uses this physics term for motion to describe actual combat. Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, vice director of operations for the Joint Staff, used the word last week, describing how wars are fought today, with radio broadcasts and bombs.

"We have been sending messages in a number of ways to the regime that we believe the regime is through," he said. "And we've been sending them both in information operations and kinetically."

Kinetic targeting

Current preferred euphemism for dropping bombs. When aircraft drop leaflets on Iraq asking the military to surrender and radio stations broadcast anti-Saddam rhetoric, the generals describe it as soft targeting. When fighter jets and cruise missiles destroy targets on the ground, the military calls it "kinetic targeting".

For the military, it is an unusually simple and vigorous description of the destruction they are about to deliver. It has also spawned a spin-off: the tens of thousands of US and British troops poised to attack Iraq are simply waiting for permission to "go kinetic".

A lot of other terms at the link.
Words of war
Thom Shanker (The New York Times)



http://www.ugr.es/~jsantana/lies/language_war.htm

[scarletwoman]

10. Let's see the list of names, then. Which specific countries have agreed to mount air strikes?

“A lot of them” smells like B.S. Last I saw, the Arab states were content to just cheer from the sidelines while the U.S. did all the bombing.