Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Tony Blair Calls For Ground Troops Pretty Much the Across Middle East

Après vous mon Capitaine.
That whole "We came, we saw, he died" bit on Gaddafi doesn't seem to be working so well.
From France 24:

Blair calls for ground troops to battle Islamic State group
Air strikes are “not enough” to stop the spread of the Islamic State (IS) and Western nations need to send ground troops to Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East to battle the jihadist group, former British prime minister Tony Blair said Tuesday.
Blair, who served as a Middle East peace envoy after his ten years in office and now heads a consultancy business, told France’s Europe 1 radio that “if we want to eliminate the Islamic State, we must find the means necessary”. 
A number of countries, including France, the US and Russia are conducting regular air strikes in Syria and Iraq, though there has yet to be any large-scale intervention on the ground. 
The British parliament initially voted against air strikes against the IS group in Syria, despite already carrying out bombing raids against the group in Iraq. 
But British MPs overwhelmingly backed extending the strikes to Syria in a second vote in December in the wake of the November terror attacks in Paris. 
Blair though said that an "international intervention force on the ground” deployed “when necessary” would be the only way to eradicate the group. 
“We cannot accept a situation where these jihadist groups can operate in territories” such as Iraq and Syria, Blair said, "but also in Libya”, where the IS group has set up branches....MORE
Here he is on Europe1.