Look at some of the "personnel and facilities" the President is talking about defending in Irbil

from McClatchy:

IRBIL, Iraq — A supposedly secret but locally well-known CIA station on the outskirts of Irbil’s airport is undergoing rapid expansion as the United States considers whether to engage in a war against Islamist militants who’ve seized control of half of Iraq in the past month.

Western contractors hired to expand the facility and a local intelligence official confirmed the construction project, which is visible from the main highway linking Irbil to Mosul, the city whose fall June 9 triggered the Islamic State’s sweep through northern and central Iraq. Residents around the airport say they can hear daily what they suspect are American drones taking off and landing at the facility.

Expansion of the facility comes as it seems all but certain that the autonomous Kurdish regional government and the central government in Baghdad, never easy partners, are headed for an irrevocable split _ complicating any U.S. military hopes of coordinating the two entities’ efforts against the Islamic State.

. . . U.S. officials have known for some time that it was likely that they’d need to coordinate any steps it takes both in Baghdad and in Irbil, where the Peshmerga has worked closely over the years with the CIA, U.S. special forces and the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s most secretive task force, which has become a bulwark of counterterrorism operations. Peshmerga forces already are manning checkpoints and bunkers to protect the facility, which sits just a few hundred yards from the highway . . .

read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/07/11/233126/expansion-of-secret-facility-in.html

President Saturday:

There’s key infrastructure inside of Iraq that we have to be concerned about. My team has been vigilant, even before ISIL went into Mosul, about foreign fighters and jihadists gathering in Syria, and now in Iraq, who might potentially launch attacks outside the region against Western targets and U.S. targets. So there’s going to be a counterterrorism element that we are already preparing for and have been working diligently on for a long time now.

Still, today's report that we're arming the Kurds supports much of what you say . . . they are definitely eager to defend that oil-rich territory, if just to keep it out of certain more threatening hands:

Spencer Ackerman ?@attackerman 1m
RT @guardian: US to directly arm Kurdish peshmerga forces in bid to thwart Isis offensive http://gu.com/p/4vkv3/tw

The Obama administration has announced it will arm the militia forces of Iraqi Kurdistan, to prevent the fall of the final bastion of pro-US territory in Iraq.

____ The weaponry is said to be light arms and ammunition, brokered not through the Defense Department – which supplies Baghdad and its security forces with heavy weaponry – but the Central Intelligence Agency, which is better positioned to supply the Kurdish peshmerga with Russian-made guns like AK-47s that the US military does not use.

US officials say they are not currently considering providing Kurdish forces, which are not under the control of the Iraqi government in Baghdad, with missiles, armored vehicles or helicopters. The move to arm them raises questions about how the US-provided rifles will affect the military balance against the Islamic State (Isis), which has captured US-supplied armored Humvees and other heavy weapons from the Iraqi military.

. . . It provides an opportunity for Obama to use a proxy for confronting Isis on the ground – a step Obama has said he is unwilling to take with US forces – which defense analysts consider the only way to dislodge Isis from territory in north and central Iraq the group has seized since June.

The danger is that arming the peshmerga will facilitate a permanent fragmentation of Iraq, something the Kurds consider a national aspiration. Several disputed and multi-ethnic cities in northern Iraq complicate any peaceful cleavage, as do major oil holdings in both Kurdish and contested territory. The Peshmerga used the June disintegration of Iraqi Army forces running from Isis as an opportunity to seize disputed areas like oil-rich Kirkuk . . .

Vattel

(9,289 posts)

9. Thanks for the information.

Reply to bigtree (Reply #8)

Mon Aug 11, 2014, 05:13 PM

Aug 2014

The facilities may be more significant than the "personnel." Obama makes it seem like we just want to protect American lives, which is BS. But I believe that because the Kurds in Northern Iraq have a relatively stable pro-USA semi-autonomous government, we want them to survive. And I think we have good reason to support them. My complaint is that Obama can't seem to control his tendency to lie whenever he addresses our military objectives. It reminds me of Bush senior when he justified the invasion of Panama by saying that he wanted to protect a kidnapped American woman there from rape. True democracy requires an informed populace. Obama, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr. don't seem to realize that.

morningfog

(18,115 posts)

12. Indeed. And some of the personnel we put there with

Reply to Vattel (Reply #9)

Mon Aug 11, 2014, 05:17 PM

Aug 2014

his decision a moth ago. He put soldiers there a moth ago and now orders strikes to protect them.

I tend to agree with you, this is an effort to keep Kurdistan from falling. He should admit it, because it will be obvious when we are still bombing the area weeks or months from now.