The Islamic State of Iraq and greater Syria (ISIS) is shredding Iraq. After seizing the northern city of Mosul on Monday, on Tuesday ISIS stormed down Iraq’s route 1 highway to take Tikrit. This victory has left them emboldened and only 110 miles from Baghdad. The Iraqi military seemingly overrun, Nouri al-Maliki’s government is greatly concerned.
Unfortunately, the disaster isn’t confined to Iraq. After all, ISIS isn’t interested in Iraq per se. Instead, it seeks a caliphate that stretches from western Syria to Iraq’s eastern border with Iran. A dominion preserved under an iron fist of brutality (think Fallujah 2004) and a base from which to export global terrorism.
What’s happening in Iraq and Syria today is the nightmare that drove George W Bush to gamble everything on his January 2007 surge. He knew that Iraq’s collapse might enable Al-Qaeda in Iraq to rip the Middle East apart. And today Al-Qaeda in Iraq’s successor – ISIS – have never been closer to their dream.
Michael Walch writes:
So here we are, in the ruins of a bipartisan Middle Eastern policy whose intellectual and moral bankruptcy is now playing out from the shores of Tripoli to Mesopotamia to Afghanistan. Thousands of American dead, many more maimed, the longest war in our history — and for what? By toppling Saddam, the first Bush administration let the genie out of the bottle; by not finishing it, Bush and Clinton gave rise to bin Laden and al-Qaeda; by restarting it after 9/11 — when the clear enemies were Saudi Arabia and Iran, not Iraq — Bush II ensured that Islamicism would wax, not wane; and by hampering our troops with metrosexual rules of engagement overseen by a purged general staff, Obama has guaranteed defeat in this particular round of the longest conflict in human history, one that dates back to the eighth century.Please read more here.
Obama likes to boast that he ends wars. But wars only end when one side gives up.
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