Charles Krauthammer
The New York Daily News
5/21/2015
Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who’s in charge — while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America’s alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in free fall.
It gets worse. The Gulf States’ top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama’s failed Camp David summit. “We were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years,” laments Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief.
Note: “were,” not “are.”
We are scraping bottom. Following six years of Obama’s steady and determined withdrawal from the Middle East, America’s standing in the region has collapsed. And yet the question incessantly asked of the various presidential candidates is not about that.
It’s a retrospective hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now?…
…Bush bequeathed to Obama a success. By whose measure? By Obama’s. As he told the troops at Fort Bragg on Dec. 14, 2011, “We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.” This was, said the President, a “moment of success.”
Which Obama proceeded to fully squander…
The complete op-ed is at The New York Daily News.
Related: ‘Bodies are ON FIRE in the streets of Ramadi!’ – John McCain calls Josh Earnest AN IDIOT over ISIS (video)
When Earnest was asked about the advancement of ISIS into Ramadi, he sneered that they weren’t going to “light their hair on fire” every time there was a setback, and claimed that Obama was still winning against the terrorist group. McCain hit back hard calling him an idiot and saying, “bodies are on fire in the streets of Ramadi as we speak!” He very soon after retracted his insult against professional moron Josh Earnest.
Update: Islamic State burned a woman alive for not engaging in an ‘extreme’ sex act, U.N. official says
…”They are institutionalizing sexual violence,” [Zainab] Bangura said of the Islamic State. “The brutalization of women and girls is central to their ideology.”
Bangura detailed the processes by which “pretty virgins” captured by the jihadists were bought and sold at auctions…
h/t Brigitte Gabriel on Facebook.
