Will the U.S. intervene on Maliki’s side in Iraq? If Obama is honest about not determining outcomes of “somebody else’s civil war,” as he said in reference to Syria, then, he’s unlikely to do anything serious in terms of providing support to embattled Maliki.
Sunni-majority towns in Iraq are falling to a broad Sunni alliance that includes ISIS as a major player. Only Iran and Maliki want us to believe that ISIS is solely responsible for the current offensive.
On the other hand, the idea that Iran is orchestrating this development in order to convince America and the international community to allow her to intervene directly in Iraq is naive. Such intervention would be too costly and Iran is already knee-deep in the Iraqi quagmire anyway, not to mention the Syrian one, and does not need to do so more overtly. Should Iran’s decide to embark on such a course, it would be a massive miscalculation on their part.
Power Vacuum in Middle East Lifts Militants – NYTimes.com.
“It’s not in America’s interests to have troops in the middle of every conflict in the Middle East, or to be permanently involved in open-ended wars in the Middle East,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser, said in an email on Saturday……
Comment: Tell Obama, not to worry too much, Ben, the holy warriors will soon bring their battle to your living-rooms, and not via TV. These things just have a nasty habit of festering, and you’re already knee-deep in this, no matter what you say or think. It’s all part of the open-endedness of our political geography these days.
US and Iran’s First Joint Military Venture: Fighting al Qaeda in Iraq.
While Western coverage portrays the Maliki-led operations against the inhabitants of the Anbar Province as a battle against Al-Qaeda, and as the U.S. supplies Maliki with advanced weapons and intelligence information to carry out these operations, the story is far more complex and involves a legitimate grievance by Iraq’s Sunni minority regarding their representation in government and the lack of any serious effort to develop their areas. The Sunnis of Iraq are being punished en masse for the crimes of the Saddam regime. But the West, the U.S. in particular, seems oblivious to that, as a result it has created a void that Al-Qaeda was all too happy to fill, just as it was happy to fill the void in Syria generated by the U.S.’ unwillingness to invest in moderate rebel. In short, and in pure sectarian terms, the U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan brought misery to the Sunnis, and the U.S. lack of intervention in Syria achieved the same on an even larger scale. Sunnis are beginning to see a pattern, and Islamists are exploiting that. For all its pretension to noninvolvement, the policies of the Obama Administration put it squarely in the camp of Iran in an ongoing identity conflict that is quickly spanning the region. A backlash is bound to happen, and it’s bound to be violent and bloody.
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 