Australia's elite special forces troops in Iraq will be gathering intelligence and targeting militants, either through ground operations or by directing air strikes, according to a senior defense force insider familiar with the SAS role. The claim runs counter to the impression being given by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who continued to say on Wednesday that Australian forces would be "military advisers" to Iraqi and Peshmerga fighters and would "not themselves normally engage in actual combat".
Australia has a large anti-terrorism anti-ISIS raid right now that involves 800 policemen.
There are various cases made that the US should ignore ISIS in the middle east and not get back into Iraq and go in to Syria. Leave it Turkey and others in the region.
Just looking at US politics shows why the US and other nations involvement is going to keep ramping up.
Obama has midterms coming up and needs to look less weak.
He needs to out coalition build George Bush 1 and George Bush 2.
Iraq still has oil.
The Republicans (other than Rand Paul and some others) are pushing to regain what was won from Iraq War 2.
Nextbigfuture has made the case that after 13 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq that there is the reasonable expectation that this will continue for many more years. The US needs to adopt a politically and economically sustainable foreign legion model.
Militarily the US homeland is safe and the threat is limited
Small scale actions could be launched into the US.
However, the New York police department alone has 34500 uniformed officers and a budget of $4.8 billion.
As we know from Ferguson, the police departments of the United States have a lot of fairly recent military equipment.
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