the iraq mess: place the blame where it is deserved

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2014/06/the-iraq-mess-place-the-blame-where-it-is-deserved.html



With Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, firmly under the control of a jihadi group so extreme that it was denounced by Al Qaeda; with government forces battling for Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein; and with the religious leader of Iraq’s Shiites issuing a call to arms at Friday’s prayers, we have reached the moment that skeptics of the 2003 United States invasion warned about all along: the implosion of the country, and, possibly, the entire region. “The state of Iraq is in imminent collapse,” Faisal Istrabadi, formerly a senior Iraqi diplomat, said on Thursday.

President Obama and his military advisers are scrambling to come up with a response. Speaking on the South Lawn of the White House on Friday, Obama indicated that some sort of U.S. military action is likely, but he ruled out sending American troops, and he made clear that any U.S. involvement would be conditional on the Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki taking steps to unify the country. The United States does not want to be drawn back into a situation in which “while we are there we are keeping a lid on things,” but “as soon as we are not there, people act in ways that are not conducive to the long-term interests of the country,” Obama said.

Having withdrawn almost all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011—there are still a few Marines there, protecting the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and other sites—the President is in a tight spot. From his body language, it is clear that he wants to reëngage with Iraq about as much as he wants to undergo a root canal. Most Americans feel the same way. But, given the huge investment of manpower, money, and prestige that the United States has invested in the country over the past decade, it would be a brave or foolhardy President who’d simply step aside and watch the fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham overrun Baghdad.

Elsewhere in Washington, the blame game has already begun. “This is the education of Barack Obama, but it’s coming at a very high cost to the Syrian people to the Iraqi people, to the American national interest,” Doug Feith, the Under-secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005, told Politico. “The President didn’t take seriously the warnings of what would happen if we withdrew and he liked the political benefits of being able to say that we’re completely out.” Senator John McCain, whom the President telephoned on Friday, has called on Obama to fire his entire national-security team, claiming, “Could all of this have been avoided? The answer is absolutely yes.”