"Our worst fears about Iraq are being realized today. The black flags of Al-Qaeda are flying over Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, just as they do over Fallujah. Al-Qaeda affiliated militants are now pressing their offensive into other parts of western Iraq and possibly beyond. This growing threat to our national security interests is the cost of President Obama's decision to withdraw all of our troops from Iraq in 2011, against the advice of our commanders and regardless of conditions on the ground. [...] "[W]e call on the president to explain to Congress and the American people how he plans to address the growing threat to our homeland and our national security interests posed by the rapidly expanding Al-Qaeda safe haven in Iraq and Syria."
I'm endlessly flummoxed by the attitude of guys like Boot. After ten years—ten years!—of postwar "peacekeeping" in Iraq, does he still seriously think that keeping a few thousand American advisors in Baghdad for yet another few years would have made a serious difference there? In Kosovo there was a peace to keep. It was fragile, sure, but it was there. In Iraq it wasn't. The ethnic fault lines hadn't changed a whit, and American influence over Nouri al-Maliki had shrunk to virtually nothing. We had spent a decade trying to change the fundamentals of Iraqi politics and we couldn't do it. An endless succession of counterterrorism initiatives didn't do it; hundreds of billions of dollars in civil aid didn't do it; and despite some mythologizing to the contrary, the surge didn't do it either. The truth is that we couldn't even make a dent. What sort of grand delusion would persuade anyone that yet another decade might do the trick?
Maliki has since backpedaled on all of these commitments and has pursued policies designed to strengthen Shiites and marginalize Sunnis. That has led to the resurgence of sectarian violence in the past few years. The Sunnis, finding themselves excluded from the political process, have taken up arms as the route to power. In the process, they have formed alliances with Sunni jihadist groups -- such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. [...] One problem always was, and still is, that Maliki had no interest in conciliatory politics on a national level. And that's why he's now facing a monumental, even terrifying armed insurgency. His troops in Nineveh province simply folded when they came under attack, not because they weren't equipped or trained to fight back but because, in many cases, they felt no allegiance to Maliki's government; they had no desire to risk their lives for the sake of its survival.