Friday, June 13, 2014

THE IRAQ MISTAKE

From Reihan Salam at Slate. He argues that Bush going into Iraq was a mistake, but also that Obama's withdrawal in 2011 from Iraq was a mistake as well.  Obama did not work hard enough to build a strong Iraq. . .but there is the question of whether Obama's foreign policy is working anywhere.

The notion that we were wrong to go in but that we were also wrong to get out is hard to comprehend for many people. Once Americans collectively settled on the idea that the Iraq War was a disaster, it was perhaps inevitable that we’d want to wash our hands of the whole ordeal. President Obama appeared to do just that when he declared in December of 2011 that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq,” knowing full well that we were doing no such thing. The disaster that is the Iraq War did not end when the last convoy of U.S. combat troops left the country more than three years ago, as many of us are now learning as the fragile Iraqi state loses ground to Sunni extremists.

Brent Scowcroft argues that Obama did not give Iraq time to develop democracy.

And the radical Islamist leading the ISIS in Iraq was released in 2009 as a non-threat.

Michael Totten on the end of Iraq. . .perhaps a regional war.  At some point the US will get sucked in.


God only knows what happens next, but this much is clear—the Syrian war is no longer the Syrian war. It’s a regional war. It spilled into Lebanon at a low level some time ago. It sucked in Iran and Hezbollah some time ago. Now it is spreading with full force at blitzkrieg speed into Iraq and has even drawn in the Kurdistan Regional Government which managed to sit out the entire Iraq war.



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