Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” NBC News’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel gave a grim assessment the current situation in Iraq.
“Today the Iraqi parliament met and a lot of people here were hoping that there could be some sort of political solution that the Iraqi political parties, the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds could get together and start to form a new government. Washington is putting a lot of its hope that you can find a political avenue out of this very violent situation we’re in,” he said.
“What happened was there was no political solution at all,” he continued. “The parliament met they met for about an hour in total. Half for that was for coffee breaks and after the coffee breaks they are they decided to leave and didn’t agree on anything except to hold another meeting a week from now.”
“So you have this situation where you have Iraq in a state of war, Baghdad in a state of lockdown, and the parliament suspending its meetings after an hour of — really only half an hour of actual work — accomplishing nothing,” Engel added. “So it’s not a very encouraging situation here…and and I think that’s why you’re seeing the US increasingly concerned that the Iraqi government the Iraqi military can’t handle the situation, don’t have a good grip on the situation. We’re seeing more US forces coming in to protect the embassy to protect the airport. The advisors are here on the ground trying to nudge the Iraqi army a in its fight against a ISIS.”
“Some counterterrorism experts we’ve been speaking to think it’s probably a matter of time before the U.S. starts taking some unilateral action — drones, air strikes.that would of course require a White House decision,” he said.
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