Sunday, June 14, 2015

We hope psychic Tom Bowman is right

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NPR reporter and fortune teller Tom Bowman weighed in on Iraq and US troop safety on Friday's second hour of The Diane Rehm Show.




  • 11:07:45

    REHMTom Bowman, how much of a shift is President Obama's announcement of 450 advisors to Iraq?
  • 11:07:59

    BOWMANYou know, it's really not much of a shift, Diane. It's adding some more trainers. We were told, initially, there'd be roughly hundreds more trainers. Actually, now we're learning most of those people will be security personnel for the roughly 50 trainers going to Anbar Province to this base called Taqqadum, which, interestingly, was an old Marine base I visited years ago. They called it TQ. So they'll be going there in the coming weeks and months training up the Sunni tribes, trying to get them to take part in the fight against ISIS.
  • 11:08:32

    BOWMANYou know, heretofore, there haven't been many Sunnis fighting. You know, they see the Iraqi government as one that's mistreating them or at least ignoring them. So it's trying to pull this country together in a unified way, get the Sunnis onboard fighting ISIS, that is the challenge.
  • 11:08:50

    REHMBut isn't there a danger that those 450 are going to be perhaps in the sightlines of, say, some ISIS fighters who may come along knowing Americans are there?
  • 11:09:07

    BOWMANWell, they'll be set in this base, again, called Taqqadum. It's a somewhat remote base. There could be rocket fire into the base. I know there have been some rocket fires into the other base where there are U.S. troops in Anbar called Al Asad. But again, these are huge bases. There is some rocket mortar fire, let's say, but at this point, no U.S. troops have been hurt or killed here. So there's a remote possibility that, you know, a rocket could come in and kill some Americans, but at this point, no, they're not going to be leaving that base, as far as we know, at this point. 




  • Let's hope Bowman's predictions are correct.  Otherwise, he'll be locked away in a fortune cookie factory, plying his 'talents' there.



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