“Why Obama’s Iraq War Will be a Disaster”

So America is
headed back to war in Iraq. That wasnt’ a good idea in 2003 and
it’s not a good idea now, I argue in a
new Daily Beast column. Here are snippets:

Why the hell is the United States going back into Iraq? And to
what end?

Americans famously don’t know much about history, but the
willingness to ignore the immediate decade-plus of failure and
plunge back into the fog of war without any clear articulation of
national interests, exit strategy, or even obvious battle plan
borders on the criminally insane.

In last week’s official notification to Congress, President
Obama invoked immediate, limited humanitarian aims as the trigger
for action— who doesn’t feel for the the Yazidis, who are
already suffering under the lunatic vision of a Caliphate
propounded by the Islamic State?

But as The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake reported, he’s using that
aspect of the mission to provide cover for a far more expansive
“military campaign [that] would last months and not weeks.” Our
goal, the president said at a press conference, is to make sure the
Islamic State “is not engaging in actions that could cripple a
country.” How’s that for an open-ended statement of purpose?…

The goal of American foreign policy should first and foremost be
the defense of American lives and goals. There’s no more reason to
go back into Iraq now than there was to invade back in 2003. If the
first decade-plus of the 21st century should have taught us
anything, it’s that the United States’ ability to terraform the
world in its image is severely limited and leads to all sorts of
unintended consequences. In terms of strict humanitarian concerns,
it would better to help people leave war-torn regions and accept
them on our shores.

But if the warrant for a new Iraq war is, in the president’s
words, to make sure that ISIL and other groups are “not engaging in
actions that could cripple a country,” America’s worst days of
playing World Police are still sadly ahead of us.

Read the whole thing here.