The Third Iraq War

http://watchingamerica.com/News/240991/the-third-iraq-war/



Obama must ponder if his hesitation to cooperate with Maliki, whom he considers corrupt, inefficient and sectarian, can be maintained when faced with the possibility of the arrival of ISIS.

The Third Iraq War
El Mundo, Spain
By Inocencio Arias
Translated By Laura L. Messer
12 June 2014
Edited by Gillian Palmer

Over 11 years ago, a few months after the United States ousted Saddam Hussein without difficulty, a journalist asked me what would happen if the weapons of mass destruction, the basis for which the Yankee invasion was mounted, did not appear. Still doubting somewhat that the weapons, which Hussein incontrovertibly had in the past, still existed, I answered, “If the arms do not appear, everything will be called into question.”

It has been so. Saddam had destroyed the weapons (although he did not openly admit it, perhaps in order to hold off Iran and his own people), and the political-ideological basis for intervention began increasingly to be questioned. In American public opinion a patent skepticism began to flower, and turned into weariness and boredom when Iraq turned into a hornets’ nest for the United States. Washington sank billions of dollars and suffered a considerable attrition of lives.

When the United States’ human costs were somewhat reduced — abundant deaths occurred in the civil war between Sunnis and Shiites — Obama put an end to the economic bleeding and ordered the withdrawal of its troops, which culminated in 2011. The American leaders have been asserting that Iraq was a reasonably stable country, thanks to the American contribution. This week’s occurrences have flatly demonstrated this is not so. The nation is presently divided in two with the jihadi movement ISIS, a radical offshoot of al-Qaida, controlling a portion of the territory surrounding Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and one of its economic engines, for days.

That some 800 ISIS militants have been able to take over a city in which there had been a garrison of some 12,000 soldiers defies all logic. It implies, on one hand, that the fundamentalist guerrillas have had some type of collusion with the area’s military class. It is inexplicable that various regiments took flight, abandoning precious equipment, uniforms of soldiers and generals, etc. On the other hand, more importantly, the costly formation of the Iraqi army ($250 billion in this sector?) carried out by the United States’ forces has not exactly been effective. A member of the passive Iraqi parliament has pointed out, “There has been complicity and negligence.”*