Call it the president’s Kumbaya moment.
It came Thursday, when President Obama announced this: “Above all, Iraqi leaders must rise above their differences and come together around a political plan for Iraq’s future.”
Ironically, it’s the same mistake George W. Bush made early on in Iraq: the idea that a political process is the path to security. We learned the hard way — and it took a surge to do it — that it’s the other way around: Security makes politics possible.
Right now, an al Qaeda offshoot called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is converging on Baghdad from the north, leaving blood and beheadings in its wake.
Meanwhile, Iran is helping the Shia-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki defend itself, while Shias are forming militias.
Notwithstanding Maliki’s high-handed treatment of the Sunnis, he is not Iraq’s chief problem. Iraq’s problem is a power vacuum partly created when the US pulled out with no agreement on bases, leaving the Maliki government more vulnerable and leaving us less leverage over its leader.
The likelihood now is this vacuum will be filled either by ISIS or Iran.
Or, in the worst of both worlds, a northern Iraq that has become a base for Sunni jihadis, a virtual Shia colony of Iran in the south — and the Kurds keeping to their own enclave while trying to snatch an oil field or two.
These outcomes are more likely now that the president has made clear, apart from token gestures, the Iraqis are pretty much on their own. Just one example: Even if you have ruled out American combat troops, why would you broadcast that to the whole world, as the president just did?
Far from promoting a “political process,” Obama sent extremists fighting for control of Iraq the message that they need not worry too much about Uncle Sam.
That leaves Iraqis caught in the crossfire of Shia and Sunni extremists opening a new front in their larger and ongoing regional war — and a US president who responds with faculty-lounge pieties about “coming together” and “national unity meetings.”