U.S. Taps Old Allies for New Iraq War

U.S. troops in Iraq is just the start. The Obama administration is also reaching out to a host of one-time friends as it ramps up its campaign against ISIS.

President Obama isn’t just sending in the Green Berets as he begins to re-enter the war in Iraq. U.S. diplomats and military officers are also reaching out to discarded tribal allies and even the Iraqi who progressives blame for tricking George W. Bush into invading Iraq in the first place.

On Wednesday, Brett McGurk, the senior State Department official responsible for policy on Iraq, met in Baghdad at the home of Ahmed Chalabi, the former exile leader who was supported by neoconservatives inside the Bush administration before the Iraq war.

The meeting, first reported by the New York Times, was the first time McGurk had traveled to Chalabi’s Baghdad estate, according to Chalabi’s Washington adviser, Francis Brooke. “They discussed the current politics and Dr. Chalabi told him it would be very difficult for (Nouri al) Maliki to continue as prime minister,” Brooke told The Daily Beast.

The outreach to Chalabi is part of a frantic scramble by U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence agencies to respond to the growing violence in Iraq before the country collapses. On Thursday, Obama announced that he was sending up to 300 U.S. special operations forces to Iraq—in addition to the 275 such troops already in country. Manned and unmanned aircraft are also now in the region. The U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, has been dispatched to the Persian Gulf. Senior U.S. military officials say they have the capability to launch airstrikes within a matter of hours against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the terror group that has seized control of several key Iraqi cities.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/19/u-s-turns-to-old-frenemies-for-new-iraq-war.html