Jackson Diehl, Washington Post: The saddest piece of Barack Obama’s legacy
Shortly after the fall of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, to the Islamic State in June 2014, a delegation of senior officials from Iraqi Kurdistan visited Washington with a troubling question: From where, they asked, would the force come to retake the city? The Iraqi army was too shattered, and the Kurds were too weak, and outside powers such as Turkey and the United States were unwilling to commit ground forces.
A lot has happened in the nearly two years since then. Among other things, the Obama administration has retrained nearly 20,000 Iraqi troops, dispatched some 5,000 U.S. trainers, Marines and special operations forces to the area, and launched more than 11,000 combat air sorties against Islamic State targets. Yet when another senior Kurdish delegation circulated through Washington last week, their question about Mosul was unchanged: Who is going to do this?
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WNU Editor: Iraq is not the only "saddest part" of President Obama's foreign policy legacy .... the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, Libya, the fracturing of alliances in the Middle East, the return of the Cold War, nuclear proliferation, China's aggressiveness in Asia .... just to name a few.