Getting Out of the Rut in Iraq

For more than the last decade, the Kurds in Iraq have been friends of the USA.  During the Iraq War, the one area of that country that was relatively peaceful was the northeastern region which is heavily Kurdish.  Even though the Kurds are Sunni Moslems, they rejected the ideology of al Qaeda and helped the USA and the new Iraqi government.  After president Obama pulled every American soldier from Iraq and left a vacuum that has been filled by ISIS, the Kurds remained friends of the USA.  The Kurdish armed forces, called the peshmerga, are the only fighting force in Iraq that has consistently stood up to and actually triumphed over the ISIS forces.  And when the Kurds were standing alone against the ISIS army and facing the possibility of being overrun, they did not ask the USA to send troops to rescue them.  No, all the Kurds asked for was weapons that would allow them to fight ISIS.  That request should have been greeted with joy by president Obama who always says that there must be local forces on the ground doing the fighting against ISIS.  Nevertheless, Obama would not sent weapons to the Kurds.  Oh, Obama said that he would send American help, but then he had the weapons shipped to Baghdad where the Iraqi central government held them for use by the Iraqi army which had just run away in the face of the ISIS attack.  The Kurds fought on armed mostly with rifles from World War II, and they stopped the ISIS advance.  In recent months, the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq have made gains against ISIS, but they still have not gotten much in the way of help from Obama.

It's time to get out of the rut in Iraq.  Obama has to realize that Iraq is never going to be a unified country again.  The Kurds deserve their own nation state.  We should arm them.  We should help them control their own destiny.  We also should realize that a properly equipped peshmerga force could drive ISIS back in many places and finally begin the destruction of these Islamic terrorists who have killed so many people.

A change in policy towards the Kurds would require Obama to admit that his earlier policy had been wrong.  That is something that Obama never does.  But there is an easy solution for Obama.  He can just tell another of those lies that he loves.  He can say that we always helped the Kurds and that our new assistance is just more of the policy he followed for years.  Sure, it's a lie, but at least the Kurds would get weapons.