The United States is quietly rushing dozens of Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones to Iraq to help government forces combat an explosion of violence by a Qaeda-backed insurgency that is gaining territory in both western Iraq and neighboring Syria.
The move follows an appeal for help in battling the extremist group by the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who met with President Obama in Washington last month. ...NYT
This action is not expected to have much effect. It's meant to be life-saving but, our military are saying, it's not likely to " reverse the sharp downturn in security" in Iraq. And it certainly suggests that we're doing this to preserve the idea that the Iraq invasion was justified rather than a serious misstep that set Iraq up for Muslim extremists.
And there remains the possibility that Obama could be blamed for not really getting us out of Iraq.
Iraq’s foreign minister has floated the idea of having American-operated, armed Predator or Reaper drones respond to the expanding militant network. But Mr. Maliki, who is positioning himself to run for a third term as prime minister and who is sensitive to nationalist sentiment at home, has not formally requested such intervention.
The idea of carrying out such drone attacks, which might prompt the question of whether the Obama administration succeeded in bringing the Iraq war to what the president has called a “responsible end,” also appears to have no support in the White House. ...NYT
Maliki is not a small-d democrat. He's most interested in his own political survival, assisted by a US government that started and bungled the war that left him in power and now is caught between two unattractive options: leave Iraq alone and lose that pied-a-terre in an oil nation, or get involved in more military action there, admitting we didn't do it right in the first place.
Instead,maybe we could just send another plane with another $12 billion in cash for .... whatever.
