Iraq 6-15-14

15, June 2014 Iraq   

It is ironic that our intelligence agencies, who have been so vigilant prying into our phone calls and emails, had been caught off-guard and flat-footed by the speed of the Iraqi ISIS insurgents who conducted a shock and awe attack on 200,000 active-duty Iraqi soldiers, capturing the second-largest city, Mosul, the oil city of Baiji, a huge cache of American weaponry and $425 million cash from Mosul’s banks. It is perplexing how so few fighters, numbering only about 4,000 could route such a large army trained by US forces. Several divisions imploded and many Sunni soldiers’ defected casting off their uniforms and joining the Sunni insurgents. In retrospect, what did we accomplish by our highly destructive shock and awe invasion in 2003? We merely replaced one highly autocratic Sunni leader, Saddam Hussein, with another autocratic, Shiite leader, Prime Minister Maliki, slipping him $25 billion of our tax dollars to enable him to fortify his power and marginalize the Sunnis. Many were rounded up, beaten, tortured and killed unleashing a fierce sectarian backlash. Thus, Maliki created his own nemesis and is now in a desperate pickle appealing to his ‘rich’ US benefactor for help.  ‘Closing the barn door after the horse has escaped’ will not remedy the situation. There is little the US or Maliki can do to put ‘Humpty Dumpty’ together again. It is time to evacuate our personnel from the US embassy in Bagdad. Maybe the helicopter is already on the roof.