Some Takes on Obama's Middle East Policy

"A Major Setback in Iraq," The Week, May 29, 2015 - The Washington Post - "The war-averse commander in chief refuses to allow U.S. troops training Iraqi forces to join them in battle, and will not send special forces behind enemy lines to mark our targets for airstrikes. His reluctance to be 'dragged into another prolonged ground war' is understandable, but Obama's 'universalist policy' is actually prolonging the conflict.'"

BloombergView.com - "But if Shiite troops and militias do the bulk of the fighting -- and commit the atrocities they inflicted on Sunni residents when liberating Tikrit last month -- it could mark the end of any hope for a unified Iraq. That'd leave Iran in a defacto control of Baghdad and the Shiite south; U.S. ally Kurdistan isolated and vulnerable; and the Sunni region a 'potential safe haven for al Qaida."

George Packer, "Dark ;Hour," The New Yorker, July 260, 2015 - "Bush never wanted it (the war on terror) to end and his successor couldn't find the way or the hour." Quantanamo remains open, drone strikes have increased, mass casualty suicide bombings are routine in half a dozen countries, the fighting in Iraq ad Syria has brutally escalated, video-taped beheadings are normal. Much as we want it to be over, the era won't end. The era has generated more shallow certitude than lasting insight, with most commentators too intent on justification or condemnation to explore the harder questions that the conflict raises." "Intervention in Libya created a failed state, a base for jihadists and massive killing." Non-intervention in Syria created much the same conditions as in Libya. "The war on terror turned a crime into a war. It risked eroding institutions put in place after the catastrophe of the Second World War, thereby making it easier for those horrors to happen again."

Surrogate Troop Training to End - The Pentagon announced yesterday that U.S. training of men in the Middle East to fight ISIS in discontinued. Despite a $500 million budget, those trained numbered only in the double digits and in the first encounter the small force broke and ran, leaving their weapons behind.

U.S. experience in training foreign troops to fight in the interest of the U.S. has been an almost unmitigated failure. It didn't work in Lebanon, where President Reagan hoped U.S. Marines would leave behind a friendly militia to help the U.S. cause in Lebanon's chaotic political scene. It didn't work when the U.S. trained Central American fighters at the School for the Americas -- since renamed. The fighters went home and committed many human rights atrocities. It didn't work in South Vietnam when the U.S.-trained South Vietnamese army quickly collapsed before the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regular forces. It didn't work in Iraq, where Iraqi military forces abandoned their military hardware, threw away their uniforms and many were captured by a much smaller ISIS force.