In his speech, President Obama said that the solution to the Iraq Crisis is not to send U.S. troops to combat, instead the “Iraqi leaders must rise above their differences” and create their own path.
While President Obama is willing to send 300 U.S. military advisors to train local Iraqi law enforcement to protect their country against groups like ISIS (or, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), he is not willing to send U.S. troops to fight Iraq’s battles for them just yet.
“It’s fair to say that their extreme ideology poses a medium- and long-term threat,” President Obama said about ISIS. “There are a lot of groups out there that probably have more advanced immediate plans directed against the United States that we have to be on constant guard for.”
“Right now, the problem with ISIS is the fact that they are destabilizing a country that could spill over into some of our allies, like Jordan, and that they are engaged in wars in Syria where in that vacuum that’s been created, they could amass more arms, more resources,” President Obama continued.
Washington is filled with finger pointers. Critics of President Obama, those who voted “Yes” to send U.S. to Iraq, claim that the president is not doing enough. The U.S. lost nearly 4,500 lives, and spent over $1 trillion dollars in the hopes to establish a friendly democracy in Iraq. It did not work.
According to TIME “Two and a half years after the U.S. withdrew its last combat forces and more than a decade since the beginning of America’s war in Iraq, ancient hatreds are grinding the country to bits… What’s happening in Iraq is the work of centuries.”
For instance, Michael Crowley from TIME wrote that as early as the year 632 Muslims disagreed over the successor of Prophet Mohammed; the Shi’ites believed that the leadership should go to Ali (Mohammed’s son-in-law), while the Sunnis believed that new leadership should be determined by consensus, and in 661, “war broke out between the two groups.”
Around 1500, the Shi’ites and Sunnis struggled for power, and under Saddam Hussein, the Sunnis controlled Iraqi politics. Later, in 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq, overthrew Hussein, and brought the Shi’ites to power. When President Obama removed U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, stating “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq,” perhaps the President was not aware of the extent of Iraq’s troubles.
Vali Nasr, an expert on Islam and a former Obama State Department official, said, “There is always the danger of passing the buck. Not to say the region doesn’t have problems or bad leadership. It does. But these things won’t go away. They are going to bite us at some point.” But for now, the crisis cannot be solved by the U.S., and intervention will only cause casualties.
President Obama is aware that the situation could continue to spread in the Middle East, that the solution to the Sunnis and Shi’ites hatred towards one another cannot be fixed overnight (or even over the course of thousands of years), and that the global economy is dependent on Middle Eastern oil. And while the “Sunni radicals plot terrorist attacks against the West and Iran’s leaders pursue nuclear technology, the U.S. cannot turn its back” (TIME). And it won’t. But despite this, President Obama continues to limit the involvement of the U.S. in Iraq, for now anyways.
Emma Tkachuk
Editor-In-Chief
etkachuk@ucmerced.edu