| | | Odumbo incompetence.....
IBD Editorial: Iraq Disaster Could And Should Have Been Prevented
24 Comments Tue, Jul 08 2014 00:00:00
Posted 07/07/2014 06:38 PM ET
Middle East: The president was getting numerous reports last year that Sunni insurgents were poised to upend Iraq, yet he dithered. Has American decline, as Dinesh D'Souza asks, become a policy objective?
Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake revealed over the weekend that President Obama was getting information right, left and center last year that Iraq could soon fall apart at the hands of al-Qaida's affiliate the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) — exactly the nightmare scenario that has unfolded in recent weeks, as a new Islamist caliphate has formed from broken-off parts of northern Iraq and Syria.
Citing it as "the kind of ominous report that American intelligence agencies had been delivering privately for months" to the White House, Lake noted Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Brett McGurk's testimony to a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee last November.
Iraq's Ministry of Justice was bombed in March, 2013, after which, McGurk noted, "scores of well-trained and professional fighters assaulted the Abu Ghraib prison complex, freeing hundreds of inmates, including mid-level al-Qaida leaders" in June of last year.
"Since then, we have seen upwards of 40 suicide bombers per month," noted McGurk, the Obama administration's senior U.S. official in Baghdad since the ISIL crisis began last month.
It has been happening, he said, because of "inherent weaknesses of Iraqi security forces, poor operational tactics, and popular grievances, which remain unaddressed, among the population in Anbar and Ninewa provinces," along with "regular movement of weapons and fighters between Syria and Iraq."
The insurgents are believed by the U.S. to be "foreign fighters who travel to Syria to join AQ/ISIL, and are then directed toward Iraq for operations."
Gee, jihadists gravitating to where they can unravel the first representative government in the Islamic Middle East, which was put in power by the U.S. It's almost as if killing Osama bin Laden wasn't the devastating blow to the global Islamist terror network Obama for years has been making it out to be.
"We have defeated this enemy before," McGurk told Congress, "through a combination of devastating and relentless security operations, and mobilizing popular forces to isolate — and in some instances, fight — AQI networks."
McGurk was of course describing President George W. Bush's 2007 surge, which just about every Democrat and Republican in Washington thought would be a fruitless endeavor.
But it wouldn't have taken a surge to prevent disaster in Iraq this year. Obama could have helped Iraq's air force bomb ISIL targets, as requested by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki early this year.
Obama was also diplomatically incompetent, failing to use nearly $11 billion in promised high-tech U.S. weaponry as leverage to convince al-Maliki to reverse the purging of "some of his military's most capable leaders," who were replaced "with yes men," as Lake noted.
So "the Iraq policy process ground to a halt at the very moment that ISIS was on the rise."
And, of course, Obama either couldn't or wouldn't get a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq, allowing U.S. forces to stay longer.
Since the Iraq disaster unfolded last month, the White House has been running around claiming what a surprise it was to everyone.
But "a dozen U.S. and Iraqi intelligence officials, diplomats, and policymakers" told Lake "a very different story ... They repeatedly warned the Obama administration that something like this was going to happen."
Is this president really that incompetent?
Or is Iraq — plus Afghanistan, plus orchestrated chaos on the U.S.-Mexican border, plus domestic fiscal policies leading us to an eventual bankruptcy — part of something else?
Dinesh D'Souza in his new film "America" asks if the American sun is setting as an intentional policy, with internationalism rising to take its place.
Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/070714-707637-obama-had-warnings-of-todays-iraq-crisis-last-year.htm#ixzz36skJpRw8
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