In response to The JV Team Is Behaving Extraordinarily Irresponsibly In Iraq:
Almost everyone agrees that Obama abruptly rolled off the golf course and authorized targeted air strikes in Iraq for two reasons: (1) he can’t afford to be seen as sitting idly by while a genocide is carried out, especially if the grand finale is 50,000 people starving to death on the side of a sun-baked mountain, and (2) ISIS was seriously threatening the Kurds and the city of Irbil.
What does it say about Obama that he was reasonably copacetic with everything leading up to that? These new pictures of atrocities we’re seeing are horrific (and the ones from the Daily Mail I linked to earlier were actually supplied by ISIS themselves – they’re basically satanic selfies) but none of this is really new. They’ve been executing, beheading, and crucifying everyone who got in their way ever since they rumbled into Iraq, and really even before that, although it’s tough to tell the war crimes apart in the bloody stew of Syria.
We had to reach Peak Horror, near the peak of Mount Sinjar, before the White House was moved to do anything except “monitor” the situation. That boils down to two final miscalculations in the long, long, long string of things Barack Obama got wrong about Iraq: he somehow managed to under-estimate how aggressive and bloodthirsty ISIS is, and he assumed the Kurds could hold them in check indefinitely.
I guess there’s really one more miscalculation Obama has to get out of his system: the belief that easy-peasy pinpoint airstrikes can dislodge an entrenched enemy with plenty of human shields. Instead of working out that Status of Forces agreement back when everyone told him to, Kid Barack decided to bail out of Iraq as fast as possible… and now we might end up working out a Status of Forces agreement to perpetually defend Kurdistan, the only part of Iraq we can salvage.
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