Yet this is far from the only distraction at present that’s stopping the White House from keeping its eye on the ISIS ball. This problem has understandably gotten caught up in the messy issue of Syria’s seemingly endless civil war, which has killed more than 200,000, many of them civilians. Here Obama’s outsourcing of America’s Syria policy to Vladimir Putin in 2013 proved a predictable strategic debacle, but at this juncture there is little to be done: the pro-Russian and pro-Iranian Assad regime is firmly in place, the opposition is hopelessly fragmented, and Syria’s fratricide will likely continue for years to come.
That there may be negative long-term consequences of outsourcing Iraq’s security—and to a large extent Syria’s, too—to the most dangerous hardliners in Tehran does not seem to be keeping anybody in this White House awake at night.
Iran has been a key, if unintended, beneficiary of the sudden rise of ISIS, the JV team no more, turning into a major strategic threat in the Middle East. In Iraq, Iran’s role on the ground in fighting ISIS has been more important than anything done by U.S. or Western forces. General Qassem Suleimani, the shadowy head of Tehran’s sinister special-operations wing of the Revolutionary Guards, a man with much foreign—including American—blood on his hands, has been in Iraq so much in recent months that he’s appeared in a photo op, while any sanctions on Iranian arms shipments have been disregarded in the case of Iraq, where the West seems happy to let the Iranians do the hard work of defeating the Islamic State.
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