The consequences are terrible for the people of Iraq, for its neighbors and eventually for us. There is no rewriting the hard facts of history as both the president and Hillary attempted to do last week. Bolting Iraq completely without leaving a residual force to provide the glue to keep Iraq’s army together and the resurgence of Al Qaeda in Iraq was a massive strategic error. Team Obama didn’t see that then, but then again it sees nothing that isn’t obviously in its own political best interests.
The latest conquests give the radical Sunni Muslim insurgents unchecked control of hundreds of miles of territory spanning the Iraqi-Syrian border, erasing the line drawn between the two countries by colonial powers and advancing the extremists’ goal of establishing a pan-Islamic state.
This is the key Obama-Clinton legacy: Undoing George W. Bush’s major achievement and allowing al Qaeda a base in which to grow and from which to metastasize.