Every American President in the past quarter century has now gone on television during prime time to tell the nation and the world that he has decided to bomb Iraq. Last night was Barack Obama’s turn, and it was a vexing performance.
.. The President never mentioned Libya. That was the last time he attempted to wage a war on the spur of the moment, getting into it, at first, as a rescue mission to prevent a predicted massacre, then escalating fast and hard—but remaining always in the air—in support of rebel ground forces whom we barely knew, and whom we understood even less, with no clear end but total regime change, and with no commitment whatever beyond the first rush of the revolution. That war then spilled over into Mali, and turned inward in Libya, so that today the country is an absolute catastrophe—far worse off than whenNATO joined its troubles, with Tripoli in the hands of forces much like ISIS.
.. Not long ago, he suggested that his handling of Libya isprobably his greatest foreign-policy regret as President. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Clinton on Iraq – Tactical Vote influenced by Iowa
She also writes about her 2007 vote against the “surge” in Iraq that Bush promoted on the advice of General David Petraeus. But we have to turn to Duty, the recent memoir by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who isn’t running for anything, to find her admission to Obama that the vote had more to do with her need not to be wrong-footed by him in the Iowa caucuses than her real thoughts about Iraq.
Oil and Erbil
Obama’s defense of Erbil is effectively the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal—as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example—are best not spoken of in polite or naïve company,
Blowback: Arming Iraq
McCain said that ISIS held American-made Howitzer cannons had come within range of Erbil, where U.S. personnel reside. That made the decision to do something urgent.