Barack Pivoting Back to “Dumb War” in Iraq?

By John W. Lillpop


Although Vice President Joe Biden once proudly declared, “I am very optimistic about -- about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration” and his boss, Barack Obama, is still taking undeserved bows for cleaning up the mess left by GW Bush, the actual situation  renders the Biden-Obama rhetoric more specious than factual.

Indeed, as is the case with nearly all of Obama’s highly-touted “achievements,” the Obama victory in Iraq has deteriorated to the point where a pivot back to “Dumb War” status seems more and more likely.

As reported:

The United States is quietly expanding the number of intelligence officers in Iraq and holding urgent meetings in Washington and Baghdad to find ways to counter growing violence by Islamic militants, U.S. government sources said.

A high-level Pentagon team is now in Iraq to assess possible assistance for Iraqi forces in their fight against radical jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a group reconstituted from an earlier incarnation of al Qaeda, said two current government officials and one former U.S. official familiar with the matter.

Senior U.S. policy officials, known as the "Deputies Committee," met in Washington this week to discuss possible responses to the deteriorating security outlook in Iraq, said a government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject matter.

White House spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan declined to comment.

The meetings underscore how Iraq's instability is posing a new foreign policy challenge for President Barack Obama, who celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops more than two years ago. Despite the concern, officials said it remains unclear whether Obama will commit significant new resources to the conflict.

Four months after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki declared war on Sunni militants in Iraq's western Anbar province, the fighting has descended into brutal atrocities, often caught on video and in photographs by both militants and Iraqi soldiers.

Iraqi soldiers say they are bogged down in a slow, vicious fight with ISIL and other Sunni factions in the city of Ramadi and around nearby Falluja.”

Once again, naïve misunderstandings and simplistic miscalculations by our in-over-his-head Community Organizer threaten to make conditions worse.