Last week President Obama sent 450 more advisors into Iraq to achieve a goal that no one understands, or has any solution for. What the hell can 450 soldiers do that billions of spending haven’t done already.
The problem with the war in the Middle East is that we have the wrong goal. We want to win it, but winning it will not solve the problem, because the problem has nothing to do with military victory and everything to do with the fact that Iraq is a figment of the imagination of a bunch of 18th century British and French colonialists who put together a country according to a grid instead of according to who lived there and how they went about it.
There is no such thing as Iraq and the sooner we realize it the better off we will be. We could send 150,000 troops in there tomorrow and in six months we will have completely destroyed ISIS but then what? We will be exactly where we were in 2011.
Let’s take a look at who we are dealing with in our vain attempt to put together some kind of country out of he mess that currently exists. First there are the Sunni’s, the majority population who we expected to fight ISIS, which is made up of Sunni’s, yeah that’s right, who deserted the country because of the Shiite leadership foisted on them by George Bush.
Those Sunnis who stayed to fight had their salaries stolen by the same slime that were taking American money and not spending it on military equipment and training, but banking it in The Bahamas. The soldiers actually had to buy ammunition with which to defend themselves. Not a way to build an army. The U.S. military put out a call recently to train 24 thousand soldiers for the Iraq army. Less than seven thousand showed up. If they don’t want to fight to defend themselves, why the hell should we be defending them?
Then there are the Shiite troops, financed and equipped in Iran. They hate us more than they hate ISIS and have already stated that they will destroy both ISIS and the American forces in Iraq.
Neither of the above, offer any possibility of being the group on which to build a country.
There are also the Kurds, a well-trained and almost well equipped fighting force to the north, who are determined to create an independent Kurdistan, if they can get the Turks off their backs and the Americans to help a little.
Throw in the independent Sunni tribes who fight only for themselves and who have no concept of Iraq as a nation and you have chaos.
Our concept of training troops is ridiculous. These people know how to fight better than we do. They have been doing it for centuries. What they don’t know how to do is get along with each other.
Much noise has been made about a coalition of the willing made up of troops from the almost five million, under arms in the other local nations. This is the biggest fallacy. Jordan can barely take care of the millions of refuges that have poured over its borders but you have to hand it to King Abdullah, he has tried. Saudi Arabia couldn’t even protect itself, if ISIS invaded. Like everything else in Saudi Arabia the army is mostly foreign, mercenaries and they would disappear at the first sign of adversity. Egypt is worried about keeping its own people from revolting and Turkey is more worried about keeping the Kurds within their borders than they are about ISIS, so there is no help for anything.
So what’s the solution? Who knows? Maybe it’s to back off and let them all settle it for themselves. It is, after all, their territory. We have proved ourselves incapable of choosing a side that will be able to win and then be able to rule. If we really want to stay involved, our best bet looks like the Kurds. Build them up and help them become an independent Kurdistan. That way, at least one third of Iraq will be civilized. This will irritate Turkey but so what. Turkey has not proved to be a good ally – ever or to anyone.
That still leaves ISIS on the board and the question there seems to be is it worth it to crush them before we withdraw or just to leave them where they are and wait o see what the rest of the Middle East will do with them. Maybe with us gone, it will encourage Egypt, Turkey, UAE, Bahrain and the Saudis to get off their asses and do something to protect their own interests.
Either way, this is a game that has to be left to the players and we should not be players because we have no skin in the game.