The day after U.S. troops withdrew, Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, began to aggressively consolidate governmental power along sectarian lines. He proceeded to undermine the professionalism of the Iraqi military by replacing competent commanders with cronies. These power grabs left Iraq unable to handle either the recent offensives by ISIS or a resurgence of smaller terrorist attacks throughout the nation. Sunni populations have little incentive to assist what they see as a Shiite-dominated central government, and Iraq’s military, lacking proper leadership and training, has faltered in the face of a much smaller ISIS force.
The crisis in Iraq is deeply connected to Clinton’s naïveté and inaction in Syria. Starting in 2009 she implemented a charm offensive toward Syrian president Bashar al-Assad — a dictator who sponsored terrorism, developed weapons of mass destruction, and aided insurgents who killed American troops in Iraq — in hopes of peeling him away from his patron state, Iran. She restored a U.S. ambassador to Syria, and her special envoy declared an easing of U.S. sanctions. Even when Assad began butchering his own people, Clinton continued her quixotic charm offensive by infamously declaring him a “reformer.”
Ultimately, Clinton’s State Department never implemented an effective strategy to urge Assad’s removal and empower Syrian moderates. It clung to a policy of caution even as the hope for a new Syria faded and prospects grew that Assad would survive, or that a failed state teeming with jihadists would burn in the heart of the Middle East. And now those jihadists, in the form of ISIS, have made the jump into Iraq.
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