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.
Great post, but very respectfully I think you're missing the main point, which is that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN IRAQI.
There are Sunni Arabs, and Shia Arabs, and Muslim Kurds of various flavors, plus a few Chalean Christians, Turkomen Shias and so on and so forth.
But there are no Iraqis.
The great mistake of Bush II's foreign policy is that he naively thought that just because an area on the map says "Iraq" or, say "Rwanda" that the people living there are correspondingly "Iraqis" or "Rwandans." Turns out that simply isn't true.
The Hutus and Tutsis living in the contrived, designed-to-fail political entity called Rwanda sure didn't see it that way.
Nor did the various tribal and religious communities uneasily sharing a Brit-created entity called "Iraq." Whatever our policy should be, to be sane it must begin with the facts as they actually are, and the most salient of those facts is that there is not, never was and never will be any such critter as an "Iraqi."