Intervension isn’t the problem.
Staying there to pretend you can nation build, is the problem.
Rand Paul should retire and spend his days at the mental institution with his old man.
Close the border, raise the drawbridge, man the battlements.
Fortress America.
Leave the Muzzies and the weenie Europeans to their fates.
And if anybody dares to mess with us, annihilate them utterly. Leave not a stone upon a stone. Kill them all.
They will never like us, but they certainly will respect us.
And since I personally don't give a rat's backside about them, respect laced with mortal fear suffices.
There is no point in being interventionist for mere short term goals (Libya) without any long term goals and a willingness and commitment to achieve them, which is a commitment and willingness that must be shared by the locals we are engaged with.
With Obama and Maliki that joint and shared thinking and commitment on long term goals for Iraq have been absent, from both men. Each has pursued a U.S.-Iraq relationship devoted to their personal partisan domestic political agendas which left the Iraqi people minus effective leadership & support, domestically and from the U.S.; making very fertile ground for the likes of ISIS and other terrorists to exploit the bad domestic situation Maliki has allowed to fester.
No. The U.S. did not create the bad domestic conditions in Iraq. The U.S. also did not do anything to seriously stymie or prevent them either, and it could have, beginning with obtaining a SOFA agreement that insured all the terrorists knew we would remain actively engaged with helping with Iraqi security issues. The caveat with that is the U.S. may not have gotten a SOFA agreement we needed with the Maliki government, no matter what. In the end our commitment cannot function as a one sided commitment, as a commitment our local partners don’t share.
If Rand Paul is right on Iraq he is right because the U.S. and Iraq’s political class were not possibly going to pursue common ground on long term goals for Iraq, because too much of Iraq and too many Iraqis are not giving COMMON and shared goals for Iraq as their priority. That is something the U.S. cannot fix.