Iraq: Obama, a Canada Dry President

Despite his responsibility, the U.S. president is looking for reasons not to act against the jihadi that are threatening Iraq’s unity.

He promised America: President Obama will not send any boys back to Iraq to prevent the jihadi Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) fanatics from seizing Baghdad from the flagging military power in place. Even though, since his speech on Friday, he has ordered the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush to move into the Persian Gulf so that his planes are within striking range of the insurgents, he is trying to buy time. By waiting for a burst of Shiite forces loyal to al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, he will avoid having to give the go-ahead to the pilots of the planes and remote drones.

Admittedly, Obama’s situation is uncomfortable: He just defined the memory that he wants to leave in history books before the West Point cadets, that of a president who ended all wars in which America was engaged in overseas territories. Not a chance. Two weeks later, he was forced into one of those situations with which a superpower like the U.S., with a complex system of alliances and a past steeped in military intervention, regularly finds itself confronted: that of helping someone to whom it is indebted.

Buying Time

So, for the moment, he is buying time and dragging his feet. Even when it comes to practicing targeted strikes using Predator drones, so widely used during his presidency, to remove America’s enemies in Pakistan and Yemen.

And then, as in his speech on Friday, he invoked morals to say that “there can be no question of America being involved in a military operation while the Baghdad authorities will not reform a political system that has left the field open to Islamic insurgents.”* It is a little like a firefighter not allowing victims in a fire onto his ladder if they can’t prove that their outlet was not the cause of the short circuit.

Machiavellianism

Al-Maliki is a creature that America put back in the saddle when they hunted down Saddam Hussein and destabilized the country’s entire administration because it had collaborated with the dictator. Their choice of man was bad because he practiced exercising power without giving a second thought to national reconciliation, instead focusing on the Shiite community’s revenge on the Sunnis ousted from all levels of responsibility. He did not need to wait for a Sunni revolt to profit from the help that they were ready to give the Islamist mercenaries who waged war in neighboring Syria against Bashar Assad. He should have demanded from Baghdad months ago the changes that he expects today. And if he did, he lacked conviction and arguments.

Now the war is in the process of destabilizing the entire region and deeply worries the Iranians who have already deployed three battalions of Revolutionary Guards to help their religious brothers. Moreover, the question arises as to whether Obama is not patiently waiting for Tehran to do the work for him, and to re-establish order and Iraq’s borders. Some see this as a clever Machiavellian attitude. Others deem it do be America’s beautiful retreat from its traditional superpower role. “It looks like alcohol, it tastes like alcohol, but it isn’t alcohol.” This could be Obama’s doctrine. A Canada Dry U.S. president.

Editor’s Note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.