Genocide in Iraq and Obama’s Reluctant Intervention

Obama is a president who is very reluctant to go to war even for a humanitarian intervention. Obama is cerebral. He admires ex-President Bush (the father), an adept realist in foreign policy, who calculated, in contrast with the son, that it was not in the national interests of American to take the final steps to overthrow Saddam Hussein, in the first Gulf War in 1991. This was even though the dictator had committed genocide against the Shiites and the Kurds, who had rebelled with the encouragement of Washington.

Obama was dragged into engagement and now jets take off from aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush, in the Persian Gulf, to bomb extremist positions of The Islamic State. Hours before the announcement about engagement in the North of Iraq so as to, among other things, avoid a massacre of religious minorities, such as the Christians and the Yizidis, in a blitz of Jihadist barbarism, Frank Wolf, a respected Republican Senator, who plans to retire after 34 years in Congress, wrote an open letter to Obama: “Much like President Clinton has deeply regretted his failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, I believe you will come to regret your inaction for years to come. You will regret the failure to do something to halt the genocide in Iraq”. http://wolf.house.gov/sites/wolf.house.gov/files/ObamaletterAug7.pdf *

Obama is acting, but, as I said, with reluctance and insisting that the intervention is limited. And in fact, the principal factor, is not humanitarian. The government believes it is in its national interest to prevent the diplomats and American military accessories posted in Erbil, the autonomous region of Kurdistan, from being threatened by the onslaught of the Islamic State. Giving assistance to the Kurds, a rare success story in the Middle East, is also is in the strategic interest of America. The Kurds are allies of the United States. They should not be betrayed.

And we must not forget the habitual suspect: petroleum. With 1.5 million inhabitants (the population now filled with refuges), Erbil is the capital of the regional Kurd government and the administrative center of its petroleum industry (an autonomous region representing 1/4 of the production of Iraqi petroleum). The Iraqi Kurds say that they would have the ninth-largest world oil reserves if they had an independent country and the oil wells operate near Erbil.

In strategic matters, even knowing of Obama’s reluctance to intervene for humanitarian ends. Even a limited operation would have unpredictable ramifications, and there exists an Iraq Syndrome which immobilizes the U.S.A. And little more than ten years after the Iraq invasion it is still appropriate to speak of the abominable legacy of George W. Bush.

Obama prefers to outsource military actions, as with what happened in the fateful intervention in Libya, calling on the Europeans, or overdoing the use of drones, un-manned aircraft. One concrete fact, however, is that Obama is coming back to Iraq, a scenario in which the Americans entered in a disastrous way in 2003 with Bush and left there in an equally disastrous manner in 2011.

The President will do all that is possible to not deepen the engagement in 2014. If it is necessary, he will simply conquer the hearts and minds of the Americans, tired of war, by proclaiming that the Islamic state represents a direct threat to the interests of the United States and not merely to martyred religious minorities and ethics in Iraq.

* Note to editor PLEASE NOTE: The translation of the quote from Caio Blinder’s opinion piece is as follows: “Much like President Clinton has deeply regretted his failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, I believe you will come to regret your inaction for years to come. You will regret the failure to do something to stop the genocide in Iraq”. This was quoted from an open letter to the President dated August 7, 2014, and certainly accurately reflected the intention of the letter….However I was unable to find the second part of the quote anywhere. The actual quote from the letter is just the first part as follows: ““Much like President Clinton has deeply regretted his failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, I believe you will come to regret your inaction for years to come.” How do I handle a translation issue such as this? The quote does not seem to include the final sentence, at least I am unable to find a source for it. : “You will regret the failure to do something to stop the genocide in Iraq”.