IRS Commissioner Koskinen is obviously obstructing the investigation of Lois Lerner's lost emails

IRS Commissioner Koskinen asserts positively that he knows the emails are lost. There are only three explanations for why he knows this:

• He read it in a paper or electronic document.
• He heard it from someone.
• The emails were entrusted to him and he lost them himself.

Now, we may legitimately ask which one of these explanations is true. Obviously, the third explanation is highly unlikely. That leaves the first and second explanations. Each of these explanations logically leads to other individuals (the author of the document the Commissioner read or the person telling the Commissioner). These individuals form additional links in the investigation and should be questioned. If the Commissioner is unwilling to reveal who these people are, then he is obstructing the investigation.

If he says he does not remember how he first learned of the loss of the emails, we may legitimately ask him: "Well, how can you then be sure now that the emails are in fact lost? There has to be some evidence that engenders in you the epistemological certainty that allows you to state unequivocally that the emails are lost. What is this evidence, from whom did you receive it, at what time did you receive it, and at what time did you reach a state of epistemological certainty that the emails were lost?"

And once again, if he is not willing to state the evidence on the basis of which he currently knows that the emails are lost, from whom he received this evidence, when he received it, and when he became certain that the emails were lost, then he is obstructing the investigation.

Maliki has failed to build consensus; so has Obama

WSJ reports:

The White House has signaled to Iraqi politicians that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, should go because of his failure to build bridges to his country's major minorities—Sunnis and Kurds—during his eight years in power.

But what about Obama's failure to build bridges to the Republican Party during his 6 years in power? Is Obama's failure to reach bi-partisan consensus with Republicans really any different? Is the Red-Blue polarization of America's politics really any different than the Shiite-Sunni split? What kind of struggles does this division portend for America's future?

It was Obama who said things like:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is a United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America, There is a United States of America.

We are not a collection of red states and blue state. We are the United States of America.

I will listen to you,
 especially when we disagree… Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics 
for too long.

How utterly he has failed to heal the divisions of the country.

The two alternatives

Several proposals have been made lately for the partition of Iraq into three geographically separate states (Kurdistan, Sunnistan, and Shiastan). There are several problems with these proposals.

First, if there is one thing that the history of the Middle East from the time of the Sykes-Picot Agreement has taught us, it is: drawing boundaries in the Middle East can be a very risky business. These boundaries can end up being quite arbitrary. The simple act of demarcating a geographic area does not mean that you are also going to end up with a religious or ethnically homogeneous population inside that area. Consider, for example, the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, which, although predominantly Kurdish, has large populations of Sunnis and Turkmen. Should this city be assigned to the new Kurdistan and all the Sunnis and Turkmen expelled? If the Sunnis and Turkmen are not expelled, then how will their interests be represented in a predominantly Kurdish government?

Furthermore, the geographic area you carve out for a particular group may not be the area that group wants to occupy -- in particular if there are petroleum assets in one geographic area and not in another.

Finally, establishing boundaries is no guarantee of peace. A relatively well-defined boundary existed between Iraq and Iran, but that boundary did not prevent Iraq and Iran from going to war at a cost of more than a million lives.

Regarding the difficulty of drawing boundaries, one needs only to observe how difficult it has been to draw boundaries between Israel and a Palestinian state. In sum, the various proposals to draw boundaries to partition Iraq into three states are anything but a panacea.

Instead of dividing Iraq up into separate geographic regions on the assumption that these regions are going to contain relatively homogenous ethnic and religious groups, it seems to me instead that an imperial government needs to be created in which the interests of all political and religious groups are represented, even if those groups are minorities and regardless of where the members of those groups are geographically dispersed. That is, a better model may be provided by the old Ottoman Empire, where millets represented the interests of various religious groups no matter where the members of those groups lived. An individual of a particular religion was a member of a particular millet. The members of the millet had a large degree of autonomy in organizing their own legal, political, and religious affairs. They were free to choose their own political and religious leaders. Above the millets, however, there stood an imperial power, to which the millets owed allegiance and paid taxes. This imperial power also mediated disputes between the various millets. Such an arrangement would avoid the issue of drawing new boundaries entirely. Instead, an individual of a particular religious creed and/or ethnic group, regardless of where he lived geographically, would have representation and recourse through the leadership of his own millet. This leadership of the millet would interface with the imperial power to try advance the goals of his community.

On the other hand, the single biggest problem with proposals either for a.) partitioning Iraq into three separate geographic regions or b.) for establishing an imperial government above a millet system is the assumption that there is an external power – either a single superpower like the US or a multi-national organization like the United Nations – that is powerful enough and willing to do what it takes to enforce the imposition of a solution that will be accepted by all parties involved. Why should we think that ISIS, which has been very successful at seizing territory through military force, gives a good goddamn about what boundaries the US thinks is appropriate for Sunnis or about the feasibility of Sunni representation through a millet? And if ISIS continues to succeed militarily and the US is unhappy with its success, the only way for the US to restrain ISIS is through the use of military force. But, it is entirely unclear to what extent the US is prepared to use military force against ISIS (or any other party in Iraq) right now.

We had our opportunity to influence the situation in Iraq when we had troops on the ground. We had made many mistakes, but were making progress. Then, President Obama withdrew all American forces from Iraq. We now have two alternatives: either we must re-insert a large American force of combat troops back into Iraq to control the situation – and possibly to serve as or establish some kind of federal super-government for Iraq (partitioned or organized into millet-like sub-groups); or we need to stand aside, not take sides, and let the parties involved, the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds fight it out among themselves until they arrive at some kind of equilibrium – and possibly new boundaries – on their own.

Silicon Valley must say no to Democrats who pushed for SCA-5 and are now pushing for racial quotas in high-tech companies

Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo recently released information (here, here, and here) on the demographic makeup of their workforces. I have problems with the numbers they reported and also with the apologetic, groveling tone exhibited in their announcements.

First, one of the demographic categories into which the workforces are broken down is "White." A coarse-grained category like "White" does not reflect the ethnic diversity of many employees. For example, the engineering team at the company I work for has more than a dozen Eastern European engineers. The fact that non-American Caucasians make up a significant portion of US employees at my company should be interpreted as a clear indicator of how globally diverse our workforce is. But, this diversity is lost when all Caucasians, no matter what their ethnic background, no matter what country they hail from, are lumped together as "White."

(In my career, I have had the privilege of working with many gifted Eastern European engineers. Eastern European engineers have been a fertile source of technological innovation in the software industry. One needs to look no further than Sergey Brin, Jan Koum, and Max Levchin to grasp the significance of Eastern European computer scientists/entrepreneurs to the American software industry. It would be tragic if the next budding Eastern European computer scientist were to emigrate to the United States only to find that he was placed at a material disadvantage in getting a job or funding for his startup simply because he was “White.”)

Next, the second largest demographic category reported by Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo is "Asian" (another disgusting coarse-grained category). At Google, fully 30% of the workforce is Asian. At LinkedIn and Yahoo, the number is even higher, 38% at LinkedIn and 39% at Yahoo. These percentages are far higher than the percentage of "Asians" in the general population, which, according to the 2010 US Census, is 5.6%. The fact that there are so many members of this minority group employed at high-tech companies is another indicator of global diversity and should be a cause for genuine celebration. Instead, it is not emphasized in the various information releases at all. Apparently, when it comes to the diversity Stasi, "Asian diversity" does not count as "real diversity." (I have written about this phenomenon before; see my blog post To CNN, "Asian diversity" is not real diversity.) To the diversity Stasi, only the number of blacks and Hispanics counts towards "real diversity."

Third, the apologetic, groveling tone of the announcements is simply disgusting and reeks of political correctness and moral cowardice. Apparently, companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo are now going to kowtow to the diversity policy and start to "work" to remedy their alleged lack of diversity. For example, the Google announcement is titled "Getting to work on diversity" and states:

Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity ... [W]e’re the first to admit that Google is miles from where we want to be—and that being totally clear about the extent of the problem is a really important part of the solution.

LinkedIn's announcement states:

Over the past few years, we’ve experienced tremendous growth and have become a truly global company, but in terms of overall diversity, we have some work to do.

White and Asian employees of high-tech companies need to ask themselves: What is my company going to do to "work" towards greater diversity? For example, if "Asians" are overrepresented now, then, presumably, one of the areas that high-tech companies will want to "work on" is bringing the percentage of those Asian employees down so that it is in line with the percentage of Asians in the general population. Does this mean that high-tech companies will introduce racial criteria and quotas into the hiring process, for example, adding points if a candidate is black or Hispanic, and subtracting points if the candidate is Asian? Such a practice is, of course, identical to the racial preferences that California Democrats recently tried to introduce into the admissions policy of the University of California through constitutional amendment SCA-5. Asian high-tech employees need to stand up and shout: "What the hell are you trying to do? We have sacrificed, studied, and worked hard to get where we are. We would like the same opportunities to be available to our children if they study and work hard, too. But now you are telling us that study and hard work are not going to be enough because we are Asian?!?" When one considers the response of the Asian community to SCA-5, it is incredible that high-tech companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo would run the risk of alienating such a significant and important portion of their workforces by implying that Asians will henceforth be placed at a material disadvantage when applying for jobs. Of course, "overrepresented" whites should be similarly outraged.

Instead of meekly acquiescing to the diversity Stasi and declaring themselves ready to institute policies that will poison their relationship with their workforces, Silicon Valley companies need to stop apologizing, stand up for themselves, and resist. The fact is: high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere have some of the most globally diverse workforces in the world. Anyone who works here knows this. The fact that the percentages of blacks, Hispanics, and women in high-tech companies is lower than the corresponding percentages in the real world is not because the hiring practices of high-tech companies are somehow discriminatory. On the contrary, the fact that high-tech companies do not hesitate to go to countries as far away as India, China, and Russia to find highly qualified engineers, provides indisputable evidence of how unprejudiced they are in their search for quality engineering talent.

If society in general were producing larger numbers of black, Hispanic, and female engineers, high-tech companies would snap them up in a heartbeat. This is because high-tech companies in Silicon Valley have always sought out the best engineering talent they could find regardless of such inconsequential characteristics as gender, race, and sexual preference. If a young person from India or China or Russia has outstanding software engineering skills and is willing to work at a good wage, why should companies be discouraged from hiring him/her? This purely meritocratic approach to hiring is one of the chief virtues of the high-tech industry. If Silicon Valley were instead to allow itself to be infected by the poison of racial and gender preferences, the consequences would be dire indeed. Imagine a Silicon Valley where companies were not free to seek the best-qualified employees, but were forced instead to use racial quotas to reach acceptable "diversity goals;" now ask yourself how long it would be before such a place became nothing more than another dispenser of racial patronage, not driven by best business practices, but sclerotic and riven by special-interest-group corruption. Silicon Valley must not let this happen. It is time for the Valley to stand up for its purely meritocratic hiring policies, and to challenge other industries to achieve the kind of business success that these policies have helped to achieve.

It is also time for Silicon Valley to rethink its alignment with the Democratic Party. It is the Democratic Party that tried to push through SCA-5, which obviously would have had an enormously detrimental effect on Asian enrollment at the University of California. And it is the Democratic Party that is now pushing for racial preferences in the hiring practices in Silicon Valley. In my blog post Jesse has landed, I wrote about the recent visit to the Valley by none other than Democratic Party grandee Jesse Jackson, whose purpose was to strong arm high-tech companies into instituting a system of racial quotas. In sum, the Democratic Party is seeking nothing less than to poison our university system and our businesses here in California with racial and gender politics. It is time for executives at Silicon Valley companies to stop groveling, get some friggin' spine, and tell the Democratic Party: your racial and gender categorizing is not welcome here.

If ISIS is viewed as liberators by Iraqi Sunnis, US must refrain from helping Iranian puppet Maliki

WSJ reports:

Radical Sunni fighters, who seized another northern Iraqi city on Monday, are being aided by local tribes who reject the Islamists' extreme ideology but sympathize with their goal of ousting the Shiite-led government in Baghdad. The uneasy alliance helps explain how several hundred insurgents from Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham, or ISIS, have handily defeated a far larger, better-equipped Iraqi army and come to control about a third of Iraqi territory. Sunni tribal leaders say mistreatment by the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has sparked protests and militancy among their ranks that created fertile ground for the al Qaeda offshoot to emerge victorious. ... Last week, as militants advanced from the northern city of Mosul down the Tigris River toward Baghdad, many local Sunnis greeted them as liberators, feted them and cheered in the streets.

In other words, if the US gives aid to the pro-Shiite, pro-Iranian Maliki government and launches an attack against ISIS, then the US will be viewed as the ally of Shiite Iran and the attack will be perceived by Sunnis worldwide as an attack on Sunnis in general.

The US must refrain from taking the side of Maliki and the Iranians in this conflict. The US installed Maliki in power, but he has forfeited any claim to our support by his sectarian, pro-Shiite, pro-Iranian policies.

At this point, it is impossible to see how the US can provide limited military assistance to either side in Iraq without alienating the other side. The only sensible policy(given that Obama foolishly withdrew all American troops and there seems to be no stomach for mounting a second large-scale intervention) is to refrain from giving aid or military support to either side.

The risk of attacking ISIS alone

We run a great risk if we demonize and attack ISIS alone in Iraq. ISIS has been successful because, as violent and extremist as they are, at some level they represent the interests (and predominantly Wahhabi sentiments) of a large segment of Sunni Muslims in Syria and Iraq and in other foreign countries. If we attack ISIS alone, we are, in essence, attacking that large segment of Sunni Muslims. If we attack ISIS alone, we will be seen as killing Sunnis in the defense of Shiites; we will be seen, in essence, as fighting on behalf of Iran. This will turn the entire spectrum of Sunni Muslims, from the most moderate to the most extreme (such as ISIS) against the United States. There is no more predictable way of inciting violent terrorist attacks against the American homeland than to attack ISIS alone.

Any attempt by the United States to intervene or play any kind of role in Iraq must be even-handed. We must recognize the legitimate interests of all the various factions: the Shiite majority, the Sunni minority, and the Kurds in Iraq; but at the same time we must not show preference for any one of these groups. In particular, we must not be seen as attacking ISIS alone while defending the pro-Shiite, pro-Iranian regime of Maliki.

Of course, as I have written repeatedly in the last week, it would be much easier to influence and shape the situation in Iraq if Obama had not withdrawn all American troops from that country. If we had American troops on the ground, then, the purpose of these troops could be to stand as a moderating, mediating, peace-keeping force between the various factions. Now, instead, we find ourselves in a situation where our only means of affecting the outcome is to attack one faction or the other.

Obama’s decision to withdraw all American troops has placed us in an impossible situation. But, before we mount bombers and drones against any faction in Iraq, we need to ask ourselves how such an attack will be interpreted by the parties on the other side and whether those parties we attack will attack us in retribution.

Why Iraqi soldiers are abandoning their posts and shedding their uniforms

Iraqi soldiers are abandoning their posts and shedding their uniforms. Various explanations are being given: they lack morale; they need their backbones stiffened; they are unwilling to fight for their country; they won't fight with the dedication of their opponents; they are cowards.

These explanations are absurd. The actual problem is that the soldiers who deserted were Sunni or Kurdish soldiers who were being asked to serve in the army of a Maliki regime that has been relentlessly pro-Shiite. Sunni and Kurdish soldiers are melting away not because they are cowards, but because they see the invading forces of ISIS as liberators (or, perhaps not as liberators, but as an army who will view any Iraqi soldiers defending the Maliki regime as collaborators). In other words, their actions are completely rational and predictable.

The problem is not that the United States did a poor job of training the Iraqi army and security forces, but that Barack Obama pulled out the American troops who were restraining and holding in check the pro-Shiite tendencies of Maliki. As soon as the last American troops left Iraq, Maliki essentially became a puppet of the Iranian government. As a result, Maliki has lost the support of Sunni and Kurdish elements, thereby making his country vulnerable to the kind of insurgency that ISIS has mounted.

US must act like a hegemon and be the dominant millet in the Middle East

Yesterday, in an opinion piece in the Daily Beast, Leslie Gelb, the eminent foreign policy expert, voiced opposition to renewed American military intervention in Iraq and proposed that the United States attempt to arrive at a "diplomatic solution" under which Iraq would become a loose federation of three autonomous regions with a viable central government in Baghdad:

[B]efore the U.S. government starts to do the next dumb thing again, namely provide fighter aircraft and drone attacks and heaven knows what else, it should stop and think for a change. ... I am in favor of trying ... the diplomatic route, which we seem to approach as a last resort, not a first one. In Iraq, this means Washington’s offering up some version of the federal plan that then-Senator Joe Biden and I proposed almost a decade ago. The idea was to keep the country whole, but to let each major group essentially run affairs in its own region. The Kurds are already doing so in the north, and many Shiites are doing so in the south. With some prompting from Washington, Maliki needs to empower a Sunni region in the center and give it its fair share of Iraq’s oil revenues. Then, maybe, the majority of moderate Sunnis and the Shiite soldiers will stand up to the crazed jihadis. A similar decentralized approach might be the only way to lessen or eventually stop the fighting in Syria and to provide some measure of peace in the future Afghanistan. [emphasis added]

As Mr Gelb observes, he and Mr Biden have made this same proposal in the past:

[O]ur plan is not partition, though even some supporters and the media mistakenly call it that. It would hold Iraq together by bringing to life the federal system enshrined in its constitution. A federal Iraq is a united Iraq but one in which power devolves to regional governments, with a limited central government responsible for common concerns such as protecting borders and distributing oil revenue.

In fact, what Mr Gelb is proposing is very similar to the old millet system of the Ottoman Empire. In his book The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years, Bernard Lewis defines millets as follows:

A millet was a religio-political community defined by its adherence to a religion. Its members were subject to the rules and even to the laws of that religion, administered by its own chiefs, naturally in so far as these did not conflict with the laws and interests of the state. In return for this measure of religious freedom and communal autonomy, non-Muslim millets owed allegiance to the state and accepted the limitations and disabilities of dhimmi [non-Muslim] status.

Wikipedia describes millets as follows:

People were bound to their millets by their religious affiliations (or their confessional communities), rather than their ethnic origins, according to the millet concept. The head of a millet — most often a religious hierarch such as the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople or, in earlier times, the Patriarch of the East — reported directly to the Ottoman Sultan or the Sassanid king, respectively. The millets had a great deal of power — they set their own laws and collected and distributed their own taxes. All that was required was loyalty to the Empire.

The main difference between the federal system that Mr Gelb is proposing and the millet system is that the former is somehow supposed to spring spontaneously into existence (to judge from what Mr Gelb says) while the latter is a system by which the conqueror controlled and administered those groups that he had conquered. In the millet system, a thin layer of a conquering class had to exist at the apex of society to maintain its structure and keep it from crumbling. Viable centralized governance that guaranteed peace between the various millets and allowed culture and commerce to flourish only came into existence when it was imposed by a conquering force from outside. This is obvious from the fact that in the past millets were answerable either to the Ottoman Sultan or the Sassanid king, who were conquerors. It is also implicit in what Mr Gelb says himself. He states: "With some prompting from Washington, Maliki needs to empower a Sunni region in the center and give it its fair share of Iraq’s oil revenues." Some "prompting" is indeed required, but the idea that diplomatic suasion, and not the application of military force, will be the kind of prompting that will get the job done is simply naive.

[Aside: in a somewhat incoherent sentence Mr Gelb writes: "Iraqis have no familiarity with federalism, which, absent an occupier or a dictator, has historically been the only path to keeping disunited countries whole." On the contrary, Iraqis certainly do have experience with federalism in the form of millets, and, yes, the millet system was always held together by an "occupier or a dictator." If history tells us anything, it is that in the Middle East there has to be some element of force that holds millet, or federal, systems together.]

In sum, the problem with Gelb's proposal at this point in time is that there is no way it can be achieved through a purely "diplomatic route." Something similar to this proposed regime could have been imposed on Iraq when we had American troops on the ground (and perhaps George W. Bush is to be faulted for not having followed Mr Gelb and then-Senator Biden's advice and for not having imposed such a regime, although at the end of the surge American troops were, in fact, serving as a buffer between various factions), but, now that President Obama has withdrawn all American troops from Iraq and reduced American influence in the country to nothing, the hope of achieving a federal state in Iraq is a pipe dream unless we intervene militarily again. If Obama had not withdrawn American troops from Iraq, those troops could serve as a buffer to keep Sunnis and Shiites apart and America could seek to mediate the conflict.

Where does that leave us, then?

To start, we can conclude that Obama never, ever should have withdrawn all American forces from Iraq. At the end of the surge, a fragile peace had been achieved between the various factions in Iraq, but Obama's withdrawal of all American troops left the various factions without a mediator and this caused the peace to fall apart. So, once again, the United States (or a coalition led by the United States) will be forced to intervene militarily in Iraq, and also now in Syria, and we will also be forced to keep troops in Afghanistan, too. (It is a sign of how out of touch Obama is that, at the very moment when he was laying out in his West Point speech his strategy for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, the growing insurgency in Iraq was demonstrating that this strategy was doomed to failure.)

The purpose of such a military intervention will be to impose by force a kind of millet (or federal, to use Mr Gelb's term) system on the region. Now, obviously, there will be differences between the old Ottoman millet system and a millet system imposed by the United States. Millets will not be defined exclusively in terms of religious affiliation but in terms of several dimensions (a complicating factor). Most notably, in the Ottoman Empire the dominant millet was the Muslims. In a millet system imposed by the United States, the dominant millet will be the United States. Individual sub-millets composed of Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Middle Eastern Christians (and other minority groups) will be controlled by the dominant millet.

In return for submission to the dominant millet, a large degree of autonomy will be given to the various sub-millets, so long as these groups demonstrate allegiance and behave in accordance with the interests of the conqueror. This model of a dominant millet is similar to the concept of protectorate or mandate that was once so common. The dominant millet will provide central administration and mediate between the various sub-millets (protecting boundaries and fairly distributing oil revenues, for example). But, the one thing that must be acknowledged is that, without a dominant millet, sometimes one that even exercises force and coercion, there is simply no way that a loose federation of ethnic and religious sub-groups can remain united for long.

It must also be acknowledged that the fact that Obama rails against a "tyrant" like Assad in Syria and declares that "Assad must go" shows how little Obama truly understands about the region. Assad, as brutal as he is, is a figurehead for the Alawites in Syria and embodies all their hopes, aspirations, and fears, just as Saddam Hussein was a figurehead for the Sunnis in Iraq. Even if Assad is overthrown, there will still remain an enormous population of Alawites in Syria whose legitimate interests will need to be represented, just as the overthrow of Hussein and the handing over of the reins of government to the pro-Shiite, pro-Iranian Maliki left an enormous group of Sunnis in Irag, whose legitimate aspirations needed to be taken into account. The problem is that these aspirations were ignored by Maliki, so that it is now those Sunnis (along with Kurds) who are now leading the new insurgency in Iraq.

In sum, the only solution is to recognize that the region is made up of a patchwork of various communities, all of whose legitimate interests (even if they are minorities) must be represented in some kind of fair fashion. A federal or millet system imposed and maintained by the United States (or some coalition led by the United States) seems to be the only answer. It is remarkable to me that Americans do not even seem to have learned the lesson of their own Senate, which was devised so that the interests of particular, often small, groups of people in particular regions (states) were not overwhelmed by the kind of majority rule found in the House of Representatives.

The only way to allow the various interests of particular factions to be represented and mediated is for the United States to assert itself with military force, to act like a conqueror, or hegemon, and to play the role of dominant millet. The Obama Doctrine of "leading from behind" and "not doing stupid shit" is an abject failure. And the Gelb-Biden proposal of trying to conjure up a federal state through purely diplomatic means is just a fantasy.

[Aside: my argument that the Middle East would benefit from an extended period of American hegemony in the region is similar to arguments that Niall Ferguson has made in his book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.]

Fareed Zakaria carries water for Obama on question of who lost Iraq

Fareed Zakaria tries to make the impossible argument that it was George W. Bush who lost Iraq:

Inevitably, in Washington, the question has surfaced: Who lost Iraq? ... The first answer to the question is: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki lost Iraq. But how did Maliki come to be prime minister of Iraq? He was the product of a series of momentous decisions made by the Bush administration.

If it is true that Maliki was George Bush's mistake, Barack Obama has had 6 years to rectify that mistake. Furthermore, before he foolishly withdrew all American troops from Iraq, Obama had the ability to rectify that mistake while he had American boots on the ground in Iraq to back him up.

In fact, restraining Maliki's pro-Shiite and anti-Sunni tendencies was one of the primary functions of American forces in Iraq, as Dexter Filkins has made clear:

U.S. diplomats and commanders argue that [American troops] played a crucial role, acting as interlocutors among the factions—and curtailing Maliki’s sectarian tendencies. “We used to restrain Maliki all the time,” Lieutenant General Michael Barbero, the deputy commander in Iraq until January, 2011, told me. “If Maliki was getting ready to send tanks to confront the Kurds, we would tell him and his officials, ‘We will physically block you from moving if you try to do that.’”

Even Zakaria himself admits that one of the main functions of US troops in Iraq during the surge was to tamp down sectarian violence and reconcile Sunnis and Shiites:

From 2003 onward, Iraq faced a Sunni insurgency that was finally tamped down by Gen. David Petraeus, who said explicitly at the time that the core element of his strategy was political, bringing Sunni tribes and militias into the fold. The surge’s success, he often noted, bought time for a real power-sharing deal in Iraq that would bring the Sunnis into the structure of the government.

In other words, Zakaria admits that at the end of the surge a fragile peace between Sunnis and Shiites had been established. How, then, did this peace fall apart? Barack Obama foolishly withdrew the American forces that were exercising a stabilizing influence on the country. Zacharia admits this, too:

If the Bush administration deserves a fair share of blame for “losing Iraq,” what about the Obama administration and its decision to withdraw American forces from the country by the end of 2011? I would have preferred to see a small American force in Iraq to try to prevent the country’s collapse. But let’s remember why this force is not there. Maliki refused to provide the guarantees that every other country in the world that hosts U.S. forces offers. Some commentators have blamed the Obama administration for negotiating badly or halfheartedly and perhaps this is true. But here’s what a senior Iraqi politician told me in the days when the U.S. withdrawal was being discussed: “It will not happen. Maliki cannot allow American troops to stay on. Iran has made very clear to Maliki that its No. 1 demand is that there be no American troops remaining in Iraq. And Maliki owes them.”

In other words, after American armed forces had completely routed Saddam Hussein's army and stood astride Baghdad as undisputed conquerors, nevertheless, when Maliki refused to negotiate a status of forces agreement that was acceptable to Obama, well, golly, there was just nothing Obama could do about it. Again, Dexter Filkins provides the real picture:

Obama ... was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis—like how many troops they wanted to leave behind—because the Administration had not decided. “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me. “We didn’t know where the President was. Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ” At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama Administration quickly rejected the idea. “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,” Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said. ... Barbero was angry at the White House for not pushing harder for an agreement. “You just had this policy vacuum and this apathy,” he said. “Now we have no leverage in Iraq. Without any troops there, we’re just another group of guys.” There is no longer anyone who can serve as a referee, he said, adding, “Everything that has happened there [Maliki's persecution of Sunnis and the ISIS insurgency that has resulted from it] was not just predictable—we predicted it.”

So, Zakaria attempts to demonstrate that it was George W. Bush, and not Barack Obama, who lost Iraq. This is the kind of brazen assertion of patent nonsense that we saw when Susan Rice attempted to assert that Benghazi was caused by that damn video and that Bowe Bergdahl served his country with "honor and distinction."

The only thing that Zakaria has succeeded in demonstrating is the extent to which he, like Susan Rice, carries water for the Obama administration. We shouldn't be surprised that Susan Rice spins for Obama. But, that Zakaria, a supposedly impartial commentator, does so, is shocking and should be roundly condemned.

Dexter Filkins again on Obama's disastrous abandonment of Iraq

In an earlier blog post, I quoted extensively from a recent piece by Dexter Filkins in which he described the growing sectarian violence in Iraq and how it had come about as a result of Obama's decision to withdraw all American troops from the country. Filkins has now published a shorter, follow-up piece in which he repeats his analysis. Again, it is worth quoting extensively:

When the Americans invaded, in March, 2003, they destroyed the Iraqi state—its military, its bureaucracy, its police force, and most everything else that might hold a country together. They spent the next nine years trying to build a state to replace the one they crushed. By 2011, by any reasonable measure, the Americans had made a lot of headway but were not finished with the job. For many months, the Obama and Maliki governments talked about keeping a residual force of American troops in Iraq, who would act largely to train Iraq’s Army and to provide intelligence against Sunni insurgents. (They would almost certainly have been barred from fighting.) Those were important reasons to stay, but the most important went largely unstated: it was to continue to act as a restraint on Maliki’s sectarian impulses, at least until the Iraqi political system was strong enough to contain him on its own. The negotiations between Obama and Maliki fell apart, in no small measure because of a lack of engagement by the White House. Today, many Iraqis, including some close to Maliki, say that a small force of American soldiers—working in non-combat roles—would have provided a crucial stabilizing factor that is now missing from Iraq. Sami al-Askari, a Maliki confidant, told me for my article this spring, “If you had a few hundred here, not even a few thousand, they would be coöperating with you, and they would become your partners.” President Obama wanted the Americans to come home, and Maliki didn’t particularly want them to stay.

In other words, the transformation of an enormous swath of the Middle East, spanning both Syria and Iraq, into a battlefield between Shiites and Sunnis can be traced directly to Obama's decision to withdraw the stabilizing influence of American troops from the Middle East. And Obama has promised us that he will pursue the same misguided policy of withdrawal from Afghanistan. What a disaster!

Don't do stupid shit

WSJ reports:

Iranian forces joined Iraq's battle against insurgents taking over a growing swath of the country as the Baghdad government girded to protect the capital and the U.S. weighed direct military assistance, including possible airstrikes. "What we have seen over the last couple of days indicates the degree to which Iraq is going to need more help—more help from us and more help from the international community," President Barack Obama said from the Oval Office. "My team is working around the clock to identify how we can provide the most effective assistance to them," he added. "I don't rule out anything."

Way to go, Bam, you moron. You have now ceded one part of Iraq to Iran and the other part to Sunni extremists. You assure us in grave tones that the best and brightest in your administration are working around the clock to identify how to provide assistance. But the simple fact is that it would be so much easier to influence the situation if you hadn't withdrawn all the dang American troops from the country.

It has been reported lately that the motto of your foreign policy is "Don't do stupid shit." Well, if there's anything that qualifies as genuinely "stupid shit," it looks like it's your policy of withdrawing all US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama is helpless to influence situation in Iraq because he withdrew all American troops. Doh!

Last month I wrote about the disaster that is President Obama's foreign policy in Iraq:

[A]fter so much American blood and treasure was spent on overthrowing Saddam Hussein and Iraq seemed to be emerging from its decades-long nightmare under Saddam, now it is instead threatening to become yet another failed nation under Iranian control and a potential training ground for extremists. Civil war between Shiites and Sunnis is breaking out and America is powerless to do anything about it. Iraq is falling into the same abyss that Syria has fallen into. All this, because Obama's disastrous "leading from behind," "hitting singles and doubles," toothless "redlines," foreign policy has withdrawn the American forces that would have given him the ability to influence the situation. ... It is possible to argue about the wisdom of George Bush's initial decision to invade Iraq. But, once that investment had been made (we are talking about 4500 American lives, after all, and Mr Obama is very fond of talking about investments), to withdraw all troops at the very moment when the investment was beginning to pay dividends is the action of an idiot.

Now, WSJ reports a Sunni insurgency is threatening to topple the Shiite, Iranian puppet government in Baghdad:

At a closed-door gathering of Gulf states in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in May, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and his Arab counterparts all signaled agreement on one thing for the first time: Islamist forces seizing territory in Syria and Iraq had become a regionwide menace that can't be ignored. What they didn't agree on was what to do about it, U.S. officials said. ... The Obama administration, unable to operate openly in Iraq since the U.S. withdrawal and unwilling to intervene in Syria for fear of getting pulled into another conflict, has left itself few options to directly confront the growing threat, according to senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials.

A Sunni insurgency would not be rolling towards Baghdad if US troops were still on the ground in Iraq. As things stand now, however, the US is helpless to influence the situation because Obama withdrew all American forces from the region. Doh!

So, Iraq is going the way of Syria, and an enormous swath of the Middle East is descending into the kind of chaos that has proven such a fertile breeding ground of terrorists in the past. Rarely have we witnessed such utter incompetence and ineptitude in foreign policy.

Taliban should win Academy Award for Best Foreign Film

There has been much discussion about whether Bo Bergdahl’s health was deteriorating prior to his exchange for 5 Taliban prisoners. This is the wrong way to analyze the situation.

President Obama’s claim that Bergdahl’s deteriorating health forced him to act quickly and without providing Congress the 30 days notice required by law before the release of prisoners from Gitmo is complete nonsense.

Bergdahl was the only US combatant the Taliban held. Bergdahl was their only bargaining chip. Bergdahl’s value to the Taliban can be seen from what they eventually got for him. He was the proverbial goose that would lay 5 golden eggs. The suggestion that the Taliban would have let Bergdahl die, and thus lose any negotiating leverage they had with the US, is simply preposterous on its face.

Even if the US had videos from the Taliban that supposedly showed the physical deterioration of Bergdahl, that is simply an indication of how savvy the Taliban were at producing such videos.

Next year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film is definitely in order.