[RC] Max Boot knows what he is talking about

[BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community]

The Weekly Standard
 
 
Obama’s Iraq 
Mosul has fallen, and al Qaeda is on the march towards Baghdad
June  23, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 39 • By _MAX _ 
(http://www.weeklystandard.com/author/max-boot) BOOT

 
 
Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, has long been hard for the  central 
government to control because of its combustible mix of Arabs and Kurds.  The 
first time I visited Mosul was in August 2003 when a tenuous calm was  
maintained by the 101st Airborne Division. Its commander, a then-obscure  
two-star 
general named David Petraeus, had on his own initiative opened the  Syrian 
border to trade, struck deals with Syria and Turkey to provide badly  needed 
electricity, restored telephone service, and held elections to elect  local 
leaders. Along the way he also managed to kill Saddam Hussein’s poisonous  
offspring Uday and Qusay.
 
This kept militants at bay, but they returned with a vengeance after  the 
101st pulled out in 2004, to be replaced by a smaller American unit whose  
officers were less attuned to the demands of civic action. Mosul became a 
hotbed  of Saddamist and Islamist militants, as I saw for myself in February 
2008 when,  during another visit, the U.S. Army convoy in which I was riding 
was hit by a  “complex ambush”: The Humvee in front of mine hit a bomb 
concealed in a big  puddle, and insurgents opened machine gun fire from the 
left. 
Luckily no one in  our unit was hurt, but a bystander had his arm sliced off 
by a flying piece of  the Humvee’s engine. 
Mosul was the last major city to be pacified by the successful  “surge.” 
It took until at least 2010 before it was secure. But now that  achievement 
has been undone. Black-clad fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq  and 
Syria (ISIS), as Al Qaeda in Iraq has rebranded itself, stormed into Mosul  
last 
week and seized control. Dispirited Iraqi soldiers ran away rather than  
fight. Many were so eager to escape that their discarded uniforms littered the 
 streets. ISIS freed more than 2,000 of its fighters from prisons and 
seized  copious stocks of money, ammunition, and weapons—many of the latter 
provided by  the United States to Iraqi forces.
 
This was only the latest and most alarming advance for this  extremist 
group, which has risen out of its grave to display dismaying strength  in 
recent 
years. In January, ISIS seized Fallujah and holds it still—a loss  that, 
like Mosul, is particularly painful to American veterans who sacrificed so  
much to wrest control of those cities from militants. Following up on their  
success in Mosul, ISIS fighters advanced south to seize, at least 
temporarily,  Tikrit, Saddam -Hussein’s hometown, and Baiji, home to Iraq’s 
largest 
oil  refinery, which supplies Baghdad with much of its electricity. Their next 
 targets are certain to be Baqubah and Baghdad. In the capital, ISIS has 
already  inflicted devastating casualties with a series of car bombings. Iraq 
Body Count  calculates that some 9,500 people were killed in Iraq last year, 
the highest  total since 2008. Worse is surely yet to come as Shiite 
militant organizations  such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Hezbollah respond 
to 
Sunni atrocities with  atrocities of their own. 
This is not just a problem for Iraq. ISIS, as the name implies, has  spread 
across the border into Syria, where it has been showing increasing  
strength amid the chaos of the Syrian civil war, in no small part because the  
United States has done so little to aid the non-jihadist opposition to Bashar  
al-Assad. ISIS is well on its way to carving out a fundamentalist caliphate 
that  stretches from Aleppo in northern Syria to Mosul in northern Iraq. The  
post-World War I borders of the Middle East seem to be unraveling. Syria is 
 being split into two entities, one controlled by Sunni Islamists, the 
other by  Hezbollah and the Iranian Quds Force and their Alawite proxies. Iraq 
is being  split into three, with a prosperous and stable Kurdish state, a 
fundamentalist  Sunni Triangle state controlled by ISIS, and the Shiite 
portions of the country  under the sway of militants backed by Iran. Iran is 
directly involved in the  fighting in both countries: It has already sent Quds 
Force troops to Syria and  now reportedly to Iraq as well. The only thing that 
remains to be determined is  whether Shiite or Sunni extremists will control 
the capital—the new battle for  Baghdad, which has already begun, is likely 
to be even bloodier than the  previous installment from 2003 to 2008.
 
It is hard to exaggerate how much of a disaster this is, not only  for 
Syria and Iraq and their neighbors, but for the United States. Rising oil  
prices (crude oil rose to over $112 a barrel last week), which could torpedo a  
weak economic recovery, are just the start of it. Senior intelligence 
officials  have testified recently that they fear Syria could become a 
launching 
ground for  attacks against the United States. Similar concerns now must 
extend to Iraq.  Certainly, the track record of Islamist militants suggests 
that 
whenever they  control a piece of terrain—whether Afghanistan before 2001 or 
Mali in 2013—they  immediately set up training camps for foreign jihadists, 
some of whom then  filter back to their home countries to commit 
atrocities. At the least,  neighboring states such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia 
will be 
destabilized by the  growing strength of ISIS; at the worst, the American 
homeland and Americans  overseas will be threatened. 
How did this disaster come about and what can be done about it?  Critics of 
the Iraq war affix blame to President George W. Bush’s decision to  invade 
in 2003. But there is no guarantee that, even absent American  intervention, 
Saddam Hussein would have had any more luck staying in power than  other 
Arab despots. A civil war might well have broken out in Iraq anyway, as  has 
been the case in Syria and Libya. It is true that Bush’s mismanagement from  
2003 to 2007 aggravated the situation, especially his foolish decisions to  
disband the Iraqi Army without sending enough U.S. troops to fill the vacuum 
and  to purge Baathists from the government in a process that was hijacked 
by Shiite  militants such as Ahmad Chalabi. This created the lawless 
conditions out of  which both Sunni and Shiite extremists arose. 
 
The “surge,” however, turned the tide and created an opening for a  more 
stable and democratic Iraq. Al Qaeda in Iraq was decimated in 2007-08. As a  
result Shiite militias such as Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army lost their 
rationale  of protecting Shiites from Sunni terrorism. Violence fell by more 
than 
90  percent, and Iraqi politics began to function. But that tenuous calm 
started to  unravel the minute that U.S. troops pulled out at the end of 2011. 
Freed of effective American oversight, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki  gave 
full vent to his Shiite sectarian tendencies by persecuting senior Sunni  
politicians and many of the Sunni commanders who, as part of the 
American-backed  Sons of Iraq, had once fought against al Qaeda. Fearing that 
they no 
longer had  a place in Iraqi politics, many Sunnis welcomed back ISIS as their 
defenders.  The Iraqi military, in turn, was unable to effectively combat 
the growing  terrorist threat because it had been deprived of American 
military support and  because Maliki stuffed its senior ranks with incompetent 
party hacks beholden to  him. The prime minister further politicized the 
military, and thus made it less  effective, by circumventing the normal chain 
of 
command to issue dubious orders  to lower-ranking officers. Many soldiers now 
lack the confidence that they are  fighting for Iraqi national interests 
rather than for a sectarian Shiite agenda.  That helps to explain why many of 
them, especially Sunnis, are so willing to run  from a fight against enemies 
who are fanatically dedicated. 
It is hard to know for sure, but odds are Iraq would have continued  making 
progress if at least 10,000 American military advisers were still  present. 
They would not have had to take part in combat, but they would have  
allowed American diplomats and generals to exert pressure on Maliki to curb his 
 
sectarian tendencies, and they would have assisted the Iraqi forces to better 
 find, fix, and finish the insurgents without causing lots of collateral  
damage.
 
So why aren’t U.S. troops still there? Obama’s supporters blame  Maliki 
and other Iraqi politicians for not agreeing to give U.S. troops legal  
immunity from prosecution. They also blame George W. Bush for negotiating a  
previous Status of Forces Agreement in 2008 that expired at the end of 2011,  
even though there was a widespread expectation in both Iraq and the United  
States that a renewal would occur when the time came. But the truth is, as  New 
York Times correspondent Michael Gordon and retired Marine general  Bernard 
Trainor make clear in their definitive book, The Endgame, Obama  did not 
try very hard to achieve a Status of Forces Agreement. He waited to  start the 
negotiations until the middle of 2011 even though the last round of  talks 
in 2008 took a year; he leaked word that, even if an agreement were  
reached, the United States would send only a tiny force of fewer than 5,000  
soldiers that was hardly worth the trouble; he insisted that the Iraqi  
parliament 
would have to approve the accord even though Iraqi leaders told their  
American counterparts this was unlikely and unnecessary; he refused to get  
directly involved in the negotiations; and then he pulled the plug on the talks 
 
when they hit their first major obstacle. Obama’s heart just wasn’t in it. 
 
[Of course not, he is an incompetent who doesn't know what he is  doing. 
Besides, he is hopelessly naive, poorly informed, and seems to view the  world 
through almost nothing but the eyes of a Leftist social worker. Yet  
Republicans  were so incompetent themselves that they could not find ways  to 
discredit Obama despite all of his huge weaknesses  BR comment] He had  won the 
presidency largely because of his opposition to the Iraq war, and he saw  no 
good reason to prolong America’s troop presence. 
Obama tried hard to sell the troop pullout as a victory. On December  14, 
2011, at Fort Bragg, he said: “Everything that American troops have done in  
Iraq—all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and 
the  training and the partnering—all of it has led to this moment of 
success. Now,  Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But 
we’re 
leaving  behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a 
representative  government that was elected by its people.”
 
Sovereign, stable, and self-reliant? Not quite. More like deeply  divided, 
violent, dysfunctional, and chaotic. Iraq does have an elected  government 
but one that roughly half of the population—Sunnis and Kurds—feels  doesn’t 
represent them. 
In hindsight, the pullout from Iraq looks increasingly like the  pullout 
from Vietnam a generation before. “We want a decent interval,” Henry  
Kissinger told Chinese leaders, implying that Washington would be okay with the 
 
conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam as long as it didn’t occur  
immediately after American troops left. A “decent interval” is what Obama got 
in  
Iraq—the country stayed quiet long enough to allow him to run for reelection 
in  2012 as the president who “ended the war.” In truth, however, Obama 
has helped  restart the war. 
Is there anything that can be done at this late date to rescue the  
situation? Sending more arms to the Iraqi military won’t do the trick. After 
the  
fall of Fallujah, the United States rushed Hellfire missiles and ScanEagle  
drones to Iraq. Soon the U.S. will deliver F-16 fighters and Apache gunships. 
 Now Maliki is even said to be asking for American air strikes. None of 
them will  do any good as long as Maliki continues to alienate Sunnis. In fact, 
heavier  weapons may aggravate the situation by allowing Maliki’s men to 
kill more  Sunnis. 
To break this worsening cycle of violence, the Obama administration  needs 
to do something it has never done before—get fully engaged in Iraq from  the 
president on down. It needs to see if Iraq might be willing to accept the  
return of U.S. military advisers, intelligence personnel, Predators, and 
Special  Operations Forces, along with enhanced military aid, in return for 
political  reforms designed to bring Shiites and Sunnis closer together and 
thus eliminate  ISIS’s base of popular support.  
There is actually a point of leverage that Obama could employ if he  chose 
to do so. On April 30 Iraq held a parliamentary election in which Maliki’s  
Rule of Law slate emerged on top with 92 seats. But that’s not enough to 
form a  government, which requires 165 seats. To win a third term in office, 
Maliki  needs the support of other parties, especially the Kurds and other 
Shiite  factions. 
His reelection looked like a foregone conclusion before the fall of  Mosul, 
but the collapse of the Iraqi security forces in the north is a major  
embarrassment that Maliki will have trouble explaining away. If Washington were 
 
to throw whatever weight it has on the side of Maliki’s opponents, there 
might  just be an opportunity to select a new prime minister who would be less 
 identified with Shiite sectarian causes—someone who could begin to heal 
Iraq’s  divisions rather than exacerbate them as Maliki has done. 
This would need to be combined with action in Syria to roll back  Islamist 
advances there, meaning principally providing more arms and training to  the 
nonjihadist opposition to Bashar al-Assad. This could be coupled with  
American airstrikes directed not only against Assad’s forces but also those of  
ISIS and other Islamist organizations such as the Nusra Front. 
This is all a long shot because it presumes (a) that the United  States 
still has leverage that it can employ in Iraq after years of neglect, (b)  that 
the moderate opposition in Syria can still act effectively after years of  
similar neglect, and (c) that Obama is willing to act strongly and 
decisively in  the Middle East instead of abandoning the region as he seems 
intent on 
doing.  But it’s the only chance to stop Iraq’s descent further into the 
abyss. If Obama  doesn’t act now, the loss of Syria and Iraq will hover like 
a dark cloud over  his presidency just as the early losses in the Iraq war 
loomed over his  predecessor’s presidency. 
[Fat chance that Hussein will do what is needed; he  doesn't understand 
what is needed. He cannot understand because his worldview is  superficial, 
pro-Islam, and based on dysfunctional  Left-wing  multi-culturalism. Our one 
chance:  Because Obama is so  poorly prepared intellectually for the office he 
holds he may feel obliged to  take the advice of experts  who are informed 
and have a decent  enough idea of what works and what to do. No-one should 
bet 10 cents that this  will happen, however, even if the WH takes a limited 
number of steps to address  the situation. Iraq calls for someone who 
actually knows what  he is doing, who actually is informed, and who actually 
comprehends how to  devise a winning strategy of war. Obama has none of these 
qualities. BR  comment] 
---------------------------- 
Max Boot is a contributing editor to The Weekly  Standard and a senior 
fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is  the author of Invisible 
Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from  Ancient Times to the Present.

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