Longest-Serving U.S. Diplomat In Iraq: Obama Gave Us ISIS
3:37 PM EST
HBO on Sunday night ran “VICE Special Report: Fighting ISIS,” in which BBC reporter Ben Anderson, a frequent visitor to all sorts of war zones, explored Iraq’s three fronts in the war against the Islamic State.
The intrepid Anderson doesn’t fully wear his mindset on his sleeve in the fascinating documentary, but its misleading scene of George W. Bush speaking on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier with the “Mission Accomplished” sign behind him (referring not to the Iraq war, let’s not forget, but to the carrier’s 10-month deployment, the longest since Vietnam), and Anderson’s jokes with Sunni tribal fighters about their scavenged Iraqi Army artillery being “weapons of mass destruction,” make it clear who he thinks is ultimately responsible for ISIS emerging.
Bush looms so large in his film, you would never think another man had been U.S. president for over five years when the ISIS “jayvee squad” gained worldwide infamy for its videotaped atrocities and swift conquest of vast territories in Iraq and Syria.
Thankfully, the production features an interview with Ali Khedery, the longest continuously serving American official in Iraq, who was a senior aide to five U.S. ambassadors and to CENTCOM chiefs, including Gen. David Petraeus during President Obama’s first term.
Khedery assessed the aftermath of the 2010 elections that gave non-sectarian Ayad Allawi more seats in parliament than incumbent Shiite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who never seemed inclined toward national reconciliation. “We were, I believe, this close to strategic victory,” Khedery told Anderson as he held thumb and forefinger an inch apart, “or at least avoiding strategic defeat. The Obama White House chose to ignore the election’s results. Nouri al-Maliki became prime minister for a second term and drove the country over the cliff.”
Khedery added: “So Bush’s original sin was invading in 2003 and Obama’s original sin was not respecting the Iraqi election’s results or the constitutional process in 2010, without any shadow of a doubt.” Although it’s highly unlikely Khedery strongly believed Bush was misguided in invading Iraq at the time it was happening and thereafter, since he was helping manage the diplomatic dimension of the whole Iraq liberation enterprise.
Maliki’s government printed 35% more ballots than were needed for the number of voters, millions of extra ones, which led to accusations of vote fraud.
Now, as Khedery told Anderson, “Iraq is more polarized than ever and Baghdad is falling under an Iranian orbit, which is furthering polarization of the society, which is strengthening ISIS and radical militant Shiite groups like the Iraqi militias.”
He pointed out that “the Iraqi government is fully penetrated by these Iranian-sponsored groups, and many of them are now in charge of the security services, they’re on the front lines with these militias, they’re receiving American weapons, they’re receiving American tanks, they have American air support, they have American diplomatic cover. So in this case we are backing the Iranian-commanded Shia militias to defeat ISIS. But the Iraqi security forces and the Iranian-backed militias are guilty of the same atrocities and war crimes that ISIS is known for. They are beheading individuals, they are torturing, and evidence of this emerges every day. And yet they are receiving billions of dollars of advanced military equipment from the United States.”
Oddly, the same Obama administration that was so adamant about ending the CIA’s limited program of enhanced interrogation of terrorists with knowledge of plots against the U.S. homeland doesn’t mind arming torturers with expensive high-tech gear when they’re backed by the regime with which Obama made a nuclear deal in Tehran.
“A critical mass of the government in Baghdad is a strategic threat to American interests and Allied interests,” Khedery warned. “If you are leveraging one radical, militant Islamist group to defeat another radical, militant Islamist group then what you’re gonna still end up with is a radical, militant Islamist group. We are creating monsters and these monsters will come back to haunt us.”
Khedery was arguing much the same thing in an August 2014 New York Times op-ed. “America sat back and watched in 2010 as Mr. Maliki’s cabinet was formed by Iranian generals in Tehran, thereby assuring its strategic defeat in Iraq. ISIS is a direct outgrowth of that defeat,” Khedery wrote, pointing a finger straight at Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“Sensing an American vacuum, both Mr. Maliki and his Iranian patrons sought to consolidate their gains by economically, politically and physically crushing their Sunni and Kurdish rivals,” Khedery noted. “Consequently, today’s ‘Iraqi security forces’ are almost exclusively Shiite, reinforced by militias financed, trained, armed and directed by Iran. Given Mr. Maliki’s blatant sectarianism and his complicity in Bashar al-Assad’s campaign of genocide against Syria’s Sunnis, Sunni radicalization and the spread of ISIS across the region were predictable.”
Obama’s ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, explained why he opposed the election winner Allawi, complaining he “did not make the slightest effort to gain Shia votes. … I concluded we needed to focus on making a better Maliki than he had been in his first four-year term, rather than engage in a quixotic effort to try to oust him.”
Anderson’s HBO documentary also showed Russian ruler Vladimir Putin in his speech to the United Nations last September, pointing to the same U.S. power vacuum Khedery described. Comparing the liberation of Iraq to Soviet “social experiments for export, attempts to push for changes within other countries based on ideological preferences,” Putin declared, “I cannot help asking those who have caused the situation, do you realize now what you’ve done?” and he justified Russia filling “the power vacuum created in some countries of the Middle East and North Africa through the emergence of anarchy areas, which immediately started to be filled with extremists and terrorists.”
Khedery’s term of choice – “America sat back” – encapsulates Obama’s Iraq failures. The Bush invasion was the opposite of America sitting back, as was the Bush surge under Gen. Petreaus. Obama claimed to support a democratic Iraq, but he not only sat back and allowed it to slip away; he caused conditions that led to the emergence of the most oppressive and dangerous Islamist terrorist threat in the world.
3:37 PM EST
HBO on Sunday night ran “VICE Special Report: Fighting ISIS,” in which BBC reporter Ben Anderson, a frequent visitor to all sorts of war zones, explored Iraq’s three fronts in the war against the Islamic State.
The intrepid Anderson doesn’t fully wear his mindset on his sleeve in the fascinating documentary, but its misleading scene of George W. Bush speaking on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier with the “Mission Accomplished” sign behind him (referring not to the Iraq war, let’s not forget, but to the carrier’s 10-month deployment, the longest since Vietnam), and Anderson’s jokes with Sunni tribal fighters about their scavenged Iraqi Army artillery being “weapons of mass destruction,” make it clear who he thinks is ultimately responsible for ISIS emerging.
Bush looms so large in his film, you would never think another man had been U.S. president for over five years when the ISIS “jayvee squad” gained worldwide infamy for its videotaped atrocities and swift conquest of vast territories in Iraq and Syria.
Thankfully, the production features an interview with Ali Khedery, the longest continuously serving American official in Iraq, who was a senior aide to five U.S. ambassadors and to CENTCOM chiefs, including Gen. David Petraeus during President Obama’s first term.
Khedery assessed the aftermath of the 2010 elections that gave non-sectarian Ayad Allawi more seats in parliament than incumbent Shiite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who never seemed inclined toward national reconciliation. “We were, I believe, this close to strategic victory,” Khedery told Anderson as he held thumb and forefinger an inch apart, “or at least avoiding strategic defeat. The Obama White House chose to ignore the election’s results. Nouri al-Maliki became prime minister for a second term and drove the country over the cliff.”
Khedery added: “So Bush’s original sin was invading in 2003 and Obama’s original sin was not respecting the Iraqi election’s results or the constitutional process in 2010, without any shadow of a doubt.” Although it’s highly unlikely Khedery strongly believed Bush was misguided in invading Iraq at the time it was happening and thereafter, since he was helping manage the diplomatic dimension of the whole Iraq liberation enterprise.
Maliki’s government printed 35% more ballots than were needed for the number of voters, millions of extra ones, which led to accusations of vote fraud.
Now, as Khedery told Anderson, “Iraq is more polarized than ever and Baghdad is falling under an Iranian orbit, which is furthering polarization of the society, which is strengthening ISIS and radical militant Shiite groups like the Iraqi militias.”
He pointed out that “the Iraqi government is fully penetrated by these Iranian-sponsored groups, and many of them are now in charge of the security services, they’re on the front lines with these militias, they’re receiving American weapons, they’re receiving American tanks, they have American air support, they have American diplomatic cover. So in this case we are backing the Iranian-commanded Shia militias to defeat ISIS. But the Iraqi security forces and the Iranian-backed militias are guilty of the same atrocities and war crimes that ISIS is known for. They are beheading individuals, they are torturing, and evidence of this emerges every day. And yet they are receiving billions of dollars of advanced military equipment from the United States.”
Oddly, the same Obama administration that was so adamant about ending the CIA’s limited program of enhanced interrogation of terrorists with knowledge of plots against the U.S. homeland doesn’t mind arming torturers with expensive high-tech gear when they’re backed by the regime with which Obama made a nuclear deal in Tehran.
“A critical mass of the government in Baghdad is a strategic threat to American interests and Allied interests,” Khedery warned. “If you are leveraging one radical, militant Islamist group to defeat another radical, militant Islamist group then what you’re gonna still end up with is a radical, militant Islamist group. We are creating monsters and these monsters will come back to haunt us.”
Khedery was arguing much the same thing in an August 2014 New York Times op-ed. “America sat back and watched in 2010 as Mr. Maliki’s cabinet was formed by Iranian generals in Tehran, thereby assuring its strategic defeat in Iraq. ISIS is a direct outgrowth of that defeat,” Khedery wrote, pointing a finger straight at Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“Sensing an American vacuum, both Mr. Maliki and his Iranian patrons sought to consolidate their gains by economically, politically and physically crushing their Sunni and Kurdish rivals,” Khedery noted. “Consequently, today’s ‘Iraqi security forces’ are almost exclusively Shiite, reinforced by militias financed, trained, armed and directed by Iran. Given Mr. Maliki’s blatant sectarianism and his complicity in Bashar al-Assad’s campaign of genocide against Syria’s Sunnis, Sunni radicalization and the spread of ISIS across the region were predictable.”
Obama’s ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, explained why he opposed the election winner Allawi, complaining he “did not make the slightest effort to gain Shia votes. … I concluded we needed to focus on making a better Maliki than he had been in his first four-year term, rather than engage in a quixotic effort to try to oust him.”
Anderson’s HBO documentary also showed Russian ruler Vladimir Putin in his speech to the United Nations last September, pointing to the same U.S. power vacuum Khedery described. Comparing the liberation of Iraq to Soviet “social experiments for export, attempts to push for changes within other countries based on ideological preferences,” Putin declared, “I cannot help asking those who have caused the situation, do you realize now what you’ve done?” and he justified Russia filling “the power vacuum created in some countries of the Middle East and North Africa through the emergence of anarchy areas, which immediately started to be filled with extremists and terrorists.”
Khedery’s term of choice – “America sat back” – encapsulates Obama’s Iraq failures. The Bush invasion was the opposite of America sitting back, as was the Bush surge under Gen. Petreaus. Obama claimed to support a democratic Iraq, but he not only sat back and allowed it to slip away; he caused conditions that led to the emergence of the most oppressive and dangerous Islamist terrorist threat in the world.
