Found this over in the comments at NRO.
“The West is being outmanoeuvred by a decaying has-been superpower as it forms an axis with a pipsqueak dictator and a clutch of turban-wearing fanatics with delusions of apocalyptic grandeur. With that kind of epic failure as his benchmark, it’s a wonder that Obama can get out of bed in the morning without getting hopelessly trapped in the eiderdown.”
Indeed, this is the mark of a very weak and dimwitted president to let this come to pass. There are those who say, “Who cares? Let’s just get out of the Middle East entirely.”
Somewhere between George W. Bush’s futile and wasteful expenditure of blood and treasure trying to bring the Enlightenment to a region with no interest in it and Barack Obama’s policy of throwing allies to the wolves and arming adversaries with nukes and stimulus money is a sane foreign policy based strictly on American interests. I am not convinced that having a Russian-Iranian axis in control of the world’s oil supply is in the American interest.
Oil is critical to the stability of Russia:
Putin’s foray into the Middle East is purely geo-political. And Europe is dependent on Russian natural gas, so the NATO resistance to Putin is likely to be nil.
It is passing strange to me that the libs of Europe haven’t figured out how to create endless energy from turnip juice or hummingbird farts. But they haven’t. Maybe they are too busy with socialism and combating the man made global warming holocaust to pay attention to fundamentals. Perhaps all the refugees flooding their systems will come up with an answer.
Years ago after the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the price of oil was double what it is now, that, in gratitude for liberation, we should receive a substantial discount for what we purchase. It is of no interest to Barak Obama that Russia in partner with Iran control the oil supply. He believes that sun and wind are the sources of the future. He owes them for contributing large sums to his campaigns.
Trying to have a discussion about the Iraq War with my family is a pointless waste of time. They refuse to consider the possibility that it was doomed to failure: “It could have worked. We needed to set some sort of government up, otherwise there would have been a power vacuum.” Me thinks that they just don’t want to admit that thousands of Americans were killed and maimed in vain. It’s unfortunate, but sadly I think it’s the case.
If we were going to play kingmaker, it should have been in the Roman model: kill the incompetent lackwit in charge, establish somebody who is going to keep a lid on things and won’t work against our interests. And then if the leader gets any bright ideas, go back, rinse, and repeat.
If we’d been smart, we’d have locked up Russian gas and oil ourselves when the USSR first fell apart and they were hurting for cash.
We made two major mistakes right off the bat in the governance of Iraq. We dissolved the Army (caused resentful former Army people and, worse, broke people who used to have some prestige) and went too far with de-Ba’athification (as with the Nazis and Soviet Communists, many at the lower echelons joined only to be able to get a decent job to feed their families–not for political reasons). With those decisions, we made enemies of those who would have been most likely to support us. We probably also looked too hard at the religious beliefs of those in positions of any authority.
Having said that, we could have kept a semi-stable Iraq if a) we hadn’t re-installed the prime minister even though he lost the election and b) hadn’t cut and run when there was no need to.
But it is true that the US is lousy at national building when we have to start essentially from scratch in a culture that is not open to democracy.