By not sending US troops to Iraq but at the same time showing that the US will not abandon the country, Obama is positioning himself as the man in the middle. He seeks to prevent a civil war in Iraq that could destabilize the region and lead to the creation of a terrorist safe haven in northern Iraq and Syria. But it would not appear that the decisions Obama has reached will help stave off a civil war or stop ISIS from picking off one Iraqi city after the other, not to mention battling for control of the country's biggest oil refinery. Sending up to 300 military advisers for possible “targeted and precise military action” against Islamists in Iraq will not help realize either goal simply because the US is trying to treat the massive wound it opened in Iraq with a Band-Aid and some mercurochrome. In invading Iraq in 2003 and toppling Saddam Hussein, the Bush Administration opened Pandora's Box. In response to 9/11, the US invaded an Arab country with hardly any jihadis, or very few of them, to overthrow Saddam. Today, with much blood and money having been spent, northern and western Iraq is full of jihadis, and the US government is busy trying to figure out how to prevent them from overrunning the rest of the country. The irony is overwhelming, as is the danger. Today, Iraq is faced with the prospect of a bloody dismemberment into three sectarian mini-states: the Sunnis in the west and northwest, the Kurds in the northeast and the Shiites in the center and the oil-rich south. While the Bush administration was responsible for the Iraqi quagmire, the Obama administration isn't entirely blameless. After ordering the pullout of the remaining US troops in 2011, when negotiations with the Maliki government about the terms for maintaining a small force had broken down, Obama was betting that the Iraqi army, with some American arms and the continued assistance of American military contractors and trainers, would be able to defend the country. He bet on the wrong horse. The Iraqi army wilted before the invading ISIS. If, in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion, the US had not decided to disband Saddam's army, the Iraqi state could have repelled the invaders. As Obama stressed in his White House press conference, there was no realistic prospect of keeping even a modest US force in Iraq. The Maliki government wanted all the US troops out, and refused to make any concessions, including approving legal immunity for American military trainers. In all fairness, there is the argument that even if the Pentagon had kept a few thousand troops on bases in Iraq, it's far from clear that their presence would have been sufficient to prevent the ISIS fighters from spilling over the border from Syria to form the armed caliphate it seeks in Iraq. Perhaps, too, if Prime Minister Al-Maliki had made a serious effort to reach out to Sunnis and Kurds, there would not have been a political stalemate and institutional power vacuum for jihadis to exploit. In the days ahead, the October 2011 decision to withdraw US forces from Iraq will be revisited. At the time, it had the overwhelming support of the American public which belatedly discovered that the Iraq invasion and occupation was ill-conceived, ill-executed and ill-fated. It had terrible consequences not just for Iraq but for many other countries. ISIS is the result of the consequences of decisions made by Bush and the rest of his neocon clique.
