Legacy of Iraq War haunts White House
U.S. seems unable to stop terrorists despite spending billions annually
WASHINGTON — The sudden collapse of Iraqi forces in the militant seizure of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, has created a crisis in Washington as the White House struggles to prevent terrorist forces from destroying a partner state and its American-equipped army.
U.S. President Barack Obama made it clear Thursday that the “emergency situation in Iraq” requires an immediate military response.
“In our conversation with the Iraqis there will be some short-term immediate things that need to be done militarily and our national security team is looking at all the options,” he said in a brief news conference.
The exact nature of the response is not clear, but Obama indicated that it could include help from allies.
Eleven years after the U.S. attacked Iraq in Operation Iraqi Freedom, warnings that the invasion would inflame the region and spark an explosion of extremist groups appear to be coming true.
Once again the U.S. appears caught off guard by the sudden retreat of the Iraqi army in the face of the Sunni terrorist group ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) that has blossomed into an efficient, motorized army.
The ISIL successes raise questions about the calibre of Obama’s intelligence, his national security team and whether, for political reasons, he was too eager to pull U.S. troops out of the region.
Questioned by reporters Thursday, Obama appeared slightly strained. He said the U.S. has, over the last year, provided the Iraqi government with military equipment and intelligence help.
“But what we’ve seen over the last couple of days indicates the degree to which Iraq’s going to need more help,” he said.
Obama said his national security team is “working around the clock” to identify what kind of assistance would be most effective. He refused to rule out any option to ensure the jihadists don’t get a permanent foothold in Iraq or Syria, he called ISIL’s sudden success “a wake-up call for the Iraqi government.”
And he blamed the insurgency on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, claiming his policy of excluding Sunnis from his government inflamed simmering sectarian conflict. He said there must be a political component so Sunni and Shia together can “bring about security and prosperity” to Iraq.
The U.S. has sent Deputy Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Brett McGurk to Iraq to evaluate the situation.
“The situation is certainly very grave on the ground,” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters. “We are working with Iraqi leaders from across the country to support a co-ordinated response. You can expect that we will provide additional assistance to the Iraqi government to combat the threat from ISIL.”
One official said the U.S. is reluctant to begin air strikes without ground intelligence from the U.S. military. Former U.S. ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey noted air strikes could easily stop ISIL’s advance by destroying its mobility and heavy weapons.
Speaking on MSNBC, Jeffrey predicted the ISIL would attempt to encircle Baghdad which could lead the Kurds to split off from Iraq and also bring in Iran to aid the Shiites against the ISIL onslaught.
Meanwhile, in Congress, Obama came under attack from all sides for not predicting the sudden collapse of Iraqi government forces in the north and for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq before the terrorist threat had been neutralized.
Republican Sen. John McCain told the senate: “Iraq’s terrorists have become a fullblown army” while Obama “fiddles.” He added: “Every hour the options become fewer and fewer.
House Speaker John Boehner, also a Republican, said: “It’s not like we haven’t seen over the last five or six months these terrorists moving in. ... They are 100 miles from Baghdad and what’s the president doing?”
Emerging from a classified briefing on the Iraqi crisis, Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine, who sits on the foreign relations committee, defended Obama, claiming that “nobody in (the) administration contemplated that Iraqi security forces would simply collapse.”
He urged the president, however, “to come forward with a proposal and bring it to Congress and let us debate on what we should do.”
U.S. forces once jailed ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq for four years. After his release he disappeared. Since then he has fought in Syria, slowly building his forces into a ruthless army of ideologues that even alQaida found too violent.
According to Jeffrey, individual wealthy Arabs initially financed ISIL. With the capture of Iraqi cities, their armories and their treasuries, the ISIL is now largely selffinancing and well armed.
Despite billions of dollars spent annually on its war on terrorism that includes collecting private communications from its own citizens, the most powerful country in the world appears, once again, to have failed to stop the growth of what is now an explosive terrorist force.