Posted on 06/12/2014 5:34:20 AM PDT by kristinn
In May 2011, in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, CNN's Fareed Zakaria wrote a column headlined "Al Qaeda Is Over":
The truth is this is a huge, devastating blow to al Qaeda, which had already been crippled by the Arab Spring. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is the end of al Qaeda in any meaningful sense of the word.
Al Qaeda is not an organization that commands massive resources. It doesn't have a big army. It doesn't have vast reservoirs of funds that it can direct easily across the world.
Zakaria is famously a confidant of Obama's, but there are limits to the horse manure even devoted courtiers swallow. Three years on, just one malign al-Qaeda progeny, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, now commands more territory than ever - from Aleppo in western Syria to the gates of Baghdad. It has all the tanks and weaponry abandoned by the Iraqi "army" we trained. It has the cash reserves of the second largest city in Iraq, and control of the northern oil fields.
SNIP
Obama and Clinton ended the war in Iraq by losing it. They "pivoted" from Iraq to Afghanistan, and wound up losing both. Hillary crowed over Gaddafi's corpse - "We came, we saw, he died" - and then sat by as her ambassador and best friend "Chris" was devoured by the mob: He died, she sat by, we're gone. The Arab Spring that Zakaria claims "crippled" al-Qaeda delivered Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood and a military coup, Tunisia to soft Islamists, Libya to ever harder Islamists, and much of Syria and Iraq to jihadists too hardcore for "mainstream" al-Qaeda.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Indeed it is. However, Malki is to be blamed as well. Even before we departed Iraq Malki was already reneging on the Sunni amnesty plan and promise to share cabinet power and economic (read oil revenue) royalities. So with no US forces to push Malki in the direction of compromise, the Sunnis really had no one to turn to but themselves. The Malki gov't and the Shia have Iran, and now the Sunnis have ISIS much to their own detriment (as they will find out and remember also from 2004-2006).
So Arab on Arab and Persian on Arab head chopping and blood shed will continue. We would be best to let them at their old game and not involve ourselves this time.
In fairness, the Middle East is a nightmare that no one can unravel, but 0bama has without doubt made it worse.
Steyn bump.
Mark Steyn ping.
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Thanks for the ping Servant of the Cross.
Thanks for the ping.
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