MUNCIE, In — Ball State telecommunications professor Phil Bremen, a former Army officer who covered Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for NBC News, says Friday’s bombing by American forces of Iraqi militants is a sign that involvement in that country is far from over.
“‘All’s well that ends well,’ Shakespeare told us, but the U.S. involvement in Iraq did not end well – and we’re paying the price for it now,” he says. “Of course, our Iraq adventure began badly, too. It was based on the trumped-up rationale of rooting out weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Then, from all accounts, there was too little attention to massaging a political peace to follow the initial U.S. military triumph.”
President Obama authorized “targeted airstrikes” to protect U.S. personnel from fighters with the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. American military forces also could use airstrikes to prevent genocide of minority groups by ISIS militants.
Bremen believes the American people in 2008 were “fed up with the whole thing” and elected President Obama, at least in part, on his promise to end the occupation of Iraq.
“Obama followed the advice of the late Sen. George Aiken, whose solution to the Vietnam fiasco was to ‘declare victory and get out.’ But the centuries-old enmities in the Middle East just kept on smoldering.”
Bremen points out that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki – whom the Bush administration had handpicked – rejected the concept of building a secular, multiethnic democracy.
“He persecuted Iraq’s Sunni minority and replaced Sunni generals with loyal – though not necessarily competent — fellow Shiites. Now they have folded under the onslaught of Sunni extremists who are fueled not only by their sectarian zeal but also by their battlefield successes in neighboring Syria.”
