Reuters
Why The White House Ignored All Those Warnings About ISIS -- Eli Lake
Team Obama was told, over and over, that the Iraqi army couldn’t stop a terror group that was ready to pounce. But Washington was a prisoner to its paradox of an Iraq policy.
On November 1, 2013, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited the White House, and made a rather stunning request. Maliki, who celebrated when the last U.S. troops left his country in 2011, asked Obama to quietly send the military back into Iraq and help his beleagured Air Force develop targets for air strikes; that’s how serious the threat from Sunni insurgents led by the extremist group ISIS had become.
Twelve days later, Brett McGurk, a deputy assistant secretary of state and the Obama administration’s senior U.S. official in Baghdad since the crisis began last month, presented to Congress a similarly dark warning. ISIS was launching upwards of 40 suicide bombers a month, he said, encouraged in part by the weakness of Maliki’s military and the aggressively anti-Sunni policies of the Shi’ite prime minister. It was the kind of ominous report that American intelligence agencies had been delivering privately for months. McGurk added that ISIS had “benefited from a permissive operating environment due to inherent weaknesses of Iraqi security forces, poor operational tactics, and popular grievances, which remain unaddressed, among the population in Anbar and Nineweh provinces.”
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My Comment: Even though the White House and President Obama were repeatedly warned that the situation was deteriorating in Iraq .... they choose to ignore these reports and the grim assessments that they were outlining on what was happening on the ground. To say that this is a major U.S. foreign policy failure is an understatement .... and if Iraq does disintegrate I am more than willing to predict that this will become President Obama's legacy on foreign policy as well as being his own "signature disaster".
1 comment:
They'll still blame Bush.
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