FLAT-FOOTED IN IRAQ

Iraq will go down in history as one of President Barack Obama’s greatest achievements, said Vice President Joe Biden in 2010, cementing his reputation as the biggest dunce ever to serve in that office.

An Islamist army headed by a man who was in U.S. custody until Mr. Obama became president has reached the outskirts of Baghdad, the headless corpses of more than 1,000 men, women and children strewn in its wake. Our embassy staff is being evacuated.

It’s no surprise the unfolding catastrophe surprised the White House. Everything that happens overseas seems to come as a shock to this president and his crack foreign policy team.

Our bloated intelligence community also appears to have been caught "flat-footed." Perhaps the IC should spy on us less, our enemies more.

By the summer of 2008, al Qaida in Iraq had been soundly defeated. Attacks on U.S. troops had all but stopped; sectarian violence had been reduced to a trickle. The troop surge had worked.

"My unit. . .had largely cleared out one of the last areas of al-Qaeda dominion in Iraq," said Iraq war vet David French. "At high cost we had taken thousands of square kilometers back from enemy control, broken the back of enemy resistance, and given the local population the chance to live something approaching a normal life."

All that was needed to preserve the peace was to leave some troops behind – 14,000 to 18,000, the ISAF commander recommended – to train Iraqi security forces, back them up if need be. But to claim credit for Mr. Bush’s victory, Mr. Obama needed the symbolism of withdrawal of all U.S. troops.

No world leader ever before, no matter how feckless, has ever lost a war his predecessor had won.

"By declining to provide a long-term security assistance force to an Iraq not yet able to handle the fight itself, we pulled defeat from the jaws of victory," wrote Iraq war vet John Nagl.

 "We were so eager to leave, that we didn’t care to ensure the Iraq we left behind was prepared to endure," wrote Iraq war vet Pete Hegseth. "Instead, we rushed to the exits-consequences to be damned."

We’re reaping those consequences now. ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) seeks to create an Islamist "caliphate." Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been imprisoned in Camp Bucca in Iraq, but was set free when President Obama ordered the prison closed in 2009.

He won’t send in ground troops, the president said before flying to Palm Springs for a weekend of fund-raising and golf. But he’s "reviewing" the Iraqi government’s request for air strikes, "monitoring" the situation, plans to conduct "intensive diplomacy."

His verbiage suggests Mr. Obama will do what he customarily does in a crisis – nothing.

This would please most Democrats, who’d like to ignore what’s happening in Iraq, as they ignored what happened in Vietnam in 1975.  

But the Communist conquest of South Vietnam posed a threat only to the South Vietnamese who’d trusted us. The likely consequence of President Obama’s passivity is regional war, as Iran sends in troops to protect Iraqi Shia (60 to 65 percent of the population); Iranian intervention causes more Iraqi Sunnis to support ISIS. 

It’ll be a war of unprecedented savagery. Both Sunni Islamists and Shia Islamists hate Americans, Israelis, and moderate Muslims. But they hate each other most of all.

The war is likely to spread to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, down the Persian Gulf, and perhaps to Jordan.

 "At stake is the single largest agglomeration of petroleum reserves on the planet," notes Australian journalist Richard Fernandez.

"It is hard to exaggerate how much of a disaster this is," said Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Rising oil prices (crude oil rose to over $112 a barrel last week), which could torpedo a weak economic recovery, are just the start of it. Senior intelligence officials have testified recently that they fear Syria could become a launching ground for attacks against the United States. Similar concerns now must extend to Iraq."

"This war won’t end with U.S. personnel escaping from the embassy roof," wrote Frederick Kagan, an  architect of the troop surge that brought the victory in Iraq Barack Obama threw away. "There is, in fact, no end in sight for this war now."

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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