By Investors.com | June 13, 2014
National Security: That Islamists chose now to make their move against Iraq's fragile representative government is no coincidence. American impotency, in word and deed, has been more and more obvious.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the less-than-satisfactory 2008 Republican presidential nominee, may be wrong a lot. But on Friday he couldn't have been more right.
"The fact is, we had the conflict won" in Iraq, he told MSNBC. "The surge had succeeded," but "then the decision was made by the Obama administration to not have a residual force in Iraq."
Led by Gen. David Petraeus and his innovative counterterrorist methods, U.S. forces turned things around in Iraq in 2007. At the time, we strongly supported that much-criticized effort, arguing the consequences of the U.S. losing another war after spending so much time, effort, blood and fortune would be catastrophic, extending far beyond the Middle East.
Now the surge might as well have not happened. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, an al-Qaida associate, has taken Mosul, Iraq's second-biggest city, and threatens Baghdad and the U.S.-backed government. The U.S.-trained Iraqi army seems largely ineffective.
It's not hard to understand what happened. CNN reporter Tim Lister put it simply: "The group seized on the power vacuum left by the U.S. withdrawal in Iraq."
We left Iraq before our job was done. We've done the same in Afghanistan, where the Taliban — with five of their top terrorists just returned by Obama — is poised to return at least into partial power.
Looking at all this, what good exactly is a dead Osama bin Laden now? ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is being hailed as the new bin Laden.
The Islamist caliphate he seeks to establish might well be a "permanent terrorist threat to the West, to our interests around the world and to ourselves," John Negroponte, former national intelligence chief and U.S. ambassador to Iraq, warned in an MSNBC interview Thursday.
And is there any doubt that the weakness Obama displayed toward Syria last year — promising to intervene if it crossed his red line on chemical weapons, then claiming he didn't draw a red line — also enticed ISIS?
Islamists have also noticed U.S. willingness to tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran next door to Iraq as its misconceived talks with Tehran head toward failure.
Obama's foreign policy impotence also clearly gave the green light to Russian ruler Vladimir Putin, who knows there's no price to pay in getting aggressive toward former components of the Soviet Union such as Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the world also sees the U.S. unable to police its own southern border, as possibly the worst illegal alien crisis in history now unfolds there.
Our weakness and our failures to keep our word or follow through on our military objectives have given us all a glimpse of the unthinkable: a world without America.
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