As the radical Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) continues its march through the US-trained Iraqi army like a knife through butter in the Baghdad sun, the US-backed Maliki government is looking its collapse square in the eyes.
What to do? Ask Washington for Gulf War III! So that is exactly what Baghdad did, requesting US airstrikes on Iraqi territory to fight back the ISIS. Obama, for his part, has made it clear that “all options are on the table.”
Nowhere in recent memory has the absurdity and counter-productivity of interventionism been so apparent as in these recent dramatic developments in Iraq. The same ISIS that is laying siege to Iraq is the same ISIS whose base in Syria has been so bolstered by US shipments of weapons to the Syrian rebels. In other words, ISIS has used Washington’s support in Syria to attack Washington-backed Iraq.
As Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden points out:
So the US is about to unleash hell against the same Al Qaeda extremists it was arming across the border in Syria? Score one more for US foreign policy. Meanwhile, the one person who benefits the most from rising crude prices, that would be Putin for those who still don’t get it, is laughing all the way to the bank.
The US taxpayer was robbed of at minimum $20.2 billion to train the Iraqi army, but as we all know most of that was stolen and squandered. Those who believed the lies of the US military and political leaders who assured us that progress was being made in Iraq, those who believed the myth of “the surge,” may now pause for a moment of self-reflection.
Neocon hero General David Petraeus promised us in his famous 2007 report, that, “the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met.” That was seven years ago so by now we might have expected a stable and prosperous Iraq.
And will Fred Kagan, the hailed “architect of the surge,” guru of Petraeus, and regular visitor to a fawning US House International Relations Committee, suffer even a bit in his career for being so fundamentally wrong about Iraq? Don’t bet on it. He and his warmongering wife, head of the Institute for the Study of War, will simply turn on a dime and demand more US intervention to address the disaster created by the initial intervention they fought so hard for.
Interventionists are never wrong, no matter how wrong they are. The US, regardless of administration, keeps pursuing the same failed foreign poiicy but expects different results. There is a famous saying about that…
