On Iraq, It Is Amazing What This White House Does Not Know
Time.com ^ | June 12, 2014 | Walter Russell Mead
Posted on June 12, 2014 at 9:20:09 PM EDT by Timber Rattler
There is a big harvest of bad news from the country formerly known as Iraq this June 12. The country’s armed forces have collapsed in the north and ISIS fighters are streaming south from Mosul. A vicious band of terrorists and thugs whose leaders were too bloodthirsty and unscrupulous for al-Qaeda now controls a significant swath of territory from the middle of Syria through the center of Iraq. The Kurds meanwhile have seized the moment to take Kirkuk, and they are unlikely to leave it voluntarily. A dramatically weakened government in Baghdad will now be more dependent than ever on Iran, and Jordan is now exposed to attacks from radicals along its long and poorly guarded eastern frontier. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes in terror for their lives, and gruesome executions and attacks are already being reported from the cities that have fallen to the terrorists. The foreign fighters with them, including, apparently, many Westerners, are acquiring expertise that will make them significantly more dangerous when they return to their home countries.
Yet none of that, grim as it is, is the worst news in the papers today. The worst news about Iraq comes from Washington, where we learn in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that senior White House officials acknowledge that these events have surprised them. They apparently had no idea that the Iraqi army was a hollow shell, that ISIS was planning something, and that the sectarian war was about to take a dramatic lurch for the worse.
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