What A Mess

There’s an old East Texas saw that allows “even a blind pig can find an acorn sometime.” By no means am I calling Barack Obama a pig but when he utters something correct in the foreign policy realm, it is about as often as the aforementioned visually impaired swine with the acorn.  In this instance, and I emphasize again, this one instance, I believe Obama is correct in that the government of Iraq should solve their own problem.

I have been dissatisfied with the developments within Iraq when the government under al-Maliki and even the prior government began to allow the systematic persecution of Iraqi Christians.  But it is one thing to disagree with how al-Maliki was running his government and the total withdrawal from any influence over the outcome.  This is an example of what happens when you allow a vacuum to exist.  Someone else will always fill it. So here we are. Do we let the murderers and thugs of ISIS run amok and establish an Iraq/Syria training ground? That is what was happened when Afghanistan harbored Bin Laden. These jihadists don’t just sit back and play dominos all day. Their evil little minds scheme and connive on methods to spread Sharia law as far as possible. There are already estimates that place the number of Americans fighting along side these killers in the vicinity of a hundred. I doubt that they feel any type of national love for our system of life in the United States and they can use their passports to return once they are battle-hardened and well trained.  Actually they don’t need passports, all they have to do is walk across our Mexican border and the Obama administration will find them a place to stay.

Barack Obama has proved to be one of the worst presidents in our history and he has two years left. Each of his failures seems to dwarf the previous one. I hope he and Secretary of State Kerry are not secretly talking with Iran on a joint endeavor in Iraq. If so a failure of epic proportions will be on the horizon.  Our position is so bad in the region that Obama’s message today may be the only way to reestablish a small level of presence in the area. But if Obama’s end game is just to keep attacking al-Maliki until he resigns this will not be the answer. ISIS is not capable of being appeased by a change of leadership in Iraq.  They want a new caliphate and they make no bones about their goals and what they have already done to achieve it. (The ISIS Annual Report is here.)  It is hard to imagine a worse President of the United States. Jimmy Carter must be smiling. He is no longer Number One.