AMERICAN INTEREST
Analysis by Walter Russell Mead & Staff
June 12, 2014

There is a big harvest of bad news from the country formerly known as Iraq this June 12. The country’s armed forces have collapsed in the north and ISIS fighters are streaming south from Mosul. A vicious band of terrorists and thugs whose leaders were too bloodthirsty and unscrupulous for al-Qaeda now controls a significant swath of territory from the middle of Syria through the center of Iraq. The Kurds meanwhile have seized the moment to take Kirkuk, and they are unlikely to leave it voluntarily. A dramatically weakened government in Baghdad will now be more dependent than ever on Iran, and Jordan is now exposed to attacks from radicals along its long and poorly guarded eastern frontier. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes in terror for their lives, and gruesome executions and attacks are already being reported from the cities that have fallen to the terrorists. The foreign fighters with them, including, apparently, many Westerners, are acquiring expertise that will make them significantly more dangerous when they return to their home countries.

All over the world, radical jihadis now feel the wind in their sails; aimless young men will be more easily recruited into these networks, funders will be inspired to increase their support, and those already wrapped up in the movement will be “inspired” by this victory to make greater efforts in the cause. Meanwhile, huge stocks of weapons and hoards of cash have fallen into the hands of the victors; ISIS is now the richest as well as the most successful terror group in the world. It is unlikely that these victories will make its leaders more moderate in their aims or gentler in their methods.

Yet none of that, grim as it is, is the worst news in the papers today. The worst news about Iraq comes from Washington, where we learn in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that senior White House officials acknowledge that these events have surprised them. They apparently had no idea that the Iraqi army was a hollow shell, that ISIS was planning something, and that the sectarian war was about to take a dramatic lurch for the worse.

……Bush certainly deserves some blame here, both for the mess in the Middle East and for the impact on a generation of American policy thinkers whose strategic instincts have been thrown off kilter by their emotional reactions to his poorly judged and poorly executed Middle East policies……

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