[Nouri al-]Maliki didn't start "ruling divisively to advance Iraq's Shiite majority" until after Barack Obama withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq, which was the only thing keeping all of Iraq's factions in line. Once the U.S. was gone, Maliki had no place else to turn to prop up his weak government than his Shiite Iranian friends next store. But Obama has to condemn Maliki for the steps Maliki was forced to take due to Obama's deliberate policy choices and pretend that Haidar al-Abadi will govern any differently than Maliki did because to do anything else would force Obama to act as George W. Bush would have, and that might just make Obama spontaneously combust.
- Me, nine months and twenty-two days ago
And, sure enough, Prime Minister al-Abadi has had govern precisely as his mentor, Nouri al-Maliki, did, and for the exact same reason. The difference so far is that while O ran al-Maliki out of town on the proverbial rail, he's leaving al-Abadi to twist, slowly, in the wind, as Iraq ceases to exist.
And the latter seems to believe that somebody on the planet still gives a damn about it:
After a string of victories by Islamic State militants, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi appealed Tuesday for more international military support, saying Iraq’s ground forces were largely going it alone despite promises of help.
“This is a failure on the part of the world,”Abadi told journalists at a meeting of foreign ministers from the U.S.-led coalition to assess strategies in its fight against the militants. “There is a lot of talk of support for Iraq. There is very little on the ground.”
First of all, it's a failure of an Iraqi "army" that flees in terror from an opponent it outnumbers forty to one. But that was the case a year ago, before Mr. al-Abadi ascended to the Potemkin premiership, so as Super Chicken always used to tell Fred the Lion.....
Second, yes, this is a failure of the world - a failure of character and honor. Why it should take the entire world to crush a single sub-national terror network of a few tens of thousands of jihadists, no matter how well-financed and how slick their recruitment pitches, has always baffled me. Not unlike the way that a "world" that prefers to avert its eyes, retreat from defeatable threats, duck fights, on the absurd rationale of "war-weariness" in the complete absence of any recent conflict of remotely sufficient magnitude in cost and carnage to justify it has always appalled and disgusted me - especially since each retreat, each duck, each running away, each delusional exercise in existential denial increases the chances to a certainty that such a cataclysmic conflict is inevitable.
But that is a lesson that will and can only be administered the hard way, Mr. al-Abadi. You are, historically speaking, Jan Syrový, sitting helplessly by while "the world" dismembers your now-former country in a futile effort to escape the conflagration its craven betrayals and under-the-bus-throwing of hapless pawns like yourself is bringing down upon it.
There is no reason why the Islamic State should be allowed to devastate the United States, any more than there is any reason why the Islamic State should be allowed to dismember Iraq and Syria, any more than there is any reason why the Islamic State should have been allowed to rise from the ashes of al Qaeda-In-Iraq to which the Bush43 Administration had interred it. But that's what Barack Obama and the American Left wanted, and that's what they got.
You and your "country," Mr. Prime Minister, are simply collateral damage.
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