On Tuesday, President Obama sent another 350 troops to Iraq, bringing the total to more than 1000 US soldiers deployed in the country — but remember, it’s not an invasion. These thousand plus American soldiers will be serving in exclusively “non-combat” roles protecting the $750 million American embassy in Baghdad, though I question how much money and how many troops we have to spend on fortification before an embassy ceases to be an embassy and becomes a military base.
This comes on the heels of nearly a month of airstrikes against ISIS targets throughout Iraq.
America has been dropping American bombs from American planes on American military equipment that ISIS plundered from the retreating Iraqi army, which America had to give weapons to so they could keep Iraq safe after the American military completely destroyed the Iraqi military in part to keep Iraq safe from the Iraqi government.
In shorter terms, the American military is now destroying American military equipment given to the Iraqi military to keep Iraqi citizens safe from terrorists, in order to keep Iraqi citizens safe from terrorists. If none of that made any sense to you at all than you have a good grasp on our foreign policy in the Middle East.
All this to stop ISIS, or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a regional al-Qaida group that splintered from perhaps the best known international terrorist organization.
ISIS originally gained notoriety for its actions in Syria, where it is among the coalition of rebel groups fighting against President Assad (the same rebel groups that a bipartisan group in Washington, including prominent figures such as President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and our own Lindsey Graham, wanted to arm around this time last year) and has now expanded their mission to Iraq as well, where they have already taken control of large swaths of the country.
ISIS is undeniably a barbaric, violent organization with nefarious goals. They’ve released videos of beheadings of beheadings of American journalists and slaughtered minority groups en masse. Then again, that was also true of the last stable government in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the collapse of which opened the power vacuum that ISIS has now filled.
Iraq, and the Middle East on the whole, is an unstable region plagued by power struggles between volatile dictators, leaving innocent civilians caught in the middle. This was true in 1991 when President George Bush Sr. invaded Iraq, this was true in 2003 when President George Bush Jr.
invaded Iraq, and it is true now in 2014 as President Barack Obama gears up to invade Iraq. It’s a horrible situation for Iraqi citizens, but one that decades of US interventions have, at best, failed to improve. Trillions of dollars and thousands of lives later, we still have no reason to believe the “third time’s the charm” when it comes to US military intervention in Iraq.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein