As the terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) threaten Baghdad, thousands of slaughtered Iraqis in their wake, it is worth recalling a few of President Obama's past statements about ISIS and al Qaeda. "If a J.V. team puts on Lakers' uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant" (January 2014). "[C]ore al Qaeda is on its heels, has been decimated" (August 2013). "So, let there be no doubt: The tide of war is receding" (September 2011).
Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is "ending" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality. Watching the black-clad ISIS jihadists take territory once secured by American blood is final proof, if any were needed, that America's enemies are not "decimated." They are emboldened and on the march.
The fall of the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Tikrit, Mosul and Tel Afar, and the establishment of terrorist safe havens across a large swath of the Arab world, present a strategic threat to the security of the United States. Mr. Obama's actions—before and after ISIS's recent advances in Iraq—have the effect of increasing that threat.
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An Iraqi soldier in Baghdad with volunteers to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, June 17. Reuters
On a trip to the Middle East this spring, we heard a constant refrain in capitals from the Persian Gulf to Israel, "Can you please explain what your president is doing?" "Why is he walking away?" "Why is he so blithely sacrificing the hard fought gains you secured in Iraq?" "Why is he abandoning your friends?" "Why is he doing deals with your enemies?"
In one Arab capital, a senior official pulled out a map of Syria and Iraq. Drawing an arc with his finger from Raqqa province in northern Syria to Anbar province in western Iraq, he said, "They will control this territory. Al Qaeda is building safe havens and training camps here. Don't the Americans care?"
Our president doesn't seem to. Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing. He seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America.
When Mr. Obama and his team came into office in 2009, al Qaeda in Iraq had been largely defeated, thanks primarily to the heroic efforts of U.S. armed forces during the surge. Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help secure the peace. Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
The tragedy unfolding in Iraq today is only part of the story. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are resurgent across the globe. According to a recent Rand study, between 2010 and 2013, there was a 58% increase in the number of Salafi-jihadist terror groups around the world. During that same period, the number of terrorists doubled.
In the face of this threat, Mr. Obama is busy ushering America's adversaries into positions of power in the Middle East. First it was the Russians in Syria. Now, in a move that defies credulity, he toys with the idea of ushering Iran into Iraq. Only a fool would believe American policy in Iraq should be ceded to Iran, the world's largest state sponsor of terror.
This president is willfully blind to the impact of his policies. Despite the threat to America unfolding across the Middle East, aided by his abandonment of Iraq, he has announced he intends to follow the same policy in Afghanistan.
Despite clear evidence of the dire need for American leadership around the world, the desperation of our allies and the glee of our enemies, President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch. Indeed, the speed of the terrorists' takeover of territory in Iraq has been matched only by the speed of American decline on his watch.
The president explained his view in his Sept. 23, 2009, speech before the United Nations General Assembly. "Any world order," he said, "that elevates one nation above others cannot long survive." Tragically, he is quickly proving the opposite—through one dangerous policy after another—that without American pre-eminence, there can be no world order.
It is time the president and his allies faced some hard truths: America remains at war, and withdrawing troops from the field of battle while our enemies stay in the fight does not "end" wars. Weakness and retreat are provocative. U.S. withdrawal from the world is disastrous and puts our own security at risk.
Al Qaeda and its affiliates are resurgent and they present a security threat not seen since the Cold War. Defeating them will require a strategy—not a fantasy. It will require sustained difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts—not empty misleading rhetoric. It will require rebuilding America's military capacity—reversing the Obama policies that have weakened our armed forces and reduced our ability to influence events around the world.
American freedom will not be secured by empty threats, meaningless red lines, leading from behind, appeasing our enemies, abandoning our allies, or apologizing for our great nation—all hallmarks to date of the Obama doctrine. Our security, and the security of our friends around the world, can only be guaranteed with a fundamental reversal of the policies of the past six years.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan said, "If history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom." President Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.
Mr. Cheney was U.S. vice president from 2001-09. Ms. Cheney was the deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs from 2002-04 and 2005-06.



I spoke about the situation in Iraq Saturday morning on C-Span’s Washington Journal. Many callers expressed skepticism at any American involvement in Iraq, arguing simply that no American interests are at stake. I respectfully disagree with that assessment.

That the United States cannot afford to allow terrorists safe haven is a lesson that not only American policymakers but also the general public should have learned after allowing al-Qaeda and other terrorists groups to set up shop in the Taliban’s Afghanistan. It is a truism that other countries have learned, be they Pakistan after the ill-considered Malakand Accord, or Lebanon, which allowed Hezbollah to fill the vacuum in its south following the Israeli withdrawal, a decision that directly led to a destructive war just six years later.

If ISIS is able to consolidate control, and given its ideological antipathy to nation-state borders, then it will likely turn its sights on Jordan. After all, while ISIS considers Jews, Christians, and Shi’ite Muslims to be heretics deserving of a slow and painful death, its main victims have always been Sunnis.
Security officials acknowledge that ISIS already has cells in Jordan. King Abdullah II of Jordan does himself no favors. Like Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia or Ayad Allawi in Iraq, Abdullah is far more popular abroad than he is at home. Indeed, when he assumed the throne upon the death of his father, Abdullah was fluent in English but stumbled through Arabic. His wife Rania might charm Western audiences and might be imagined to attract Palestinian support because of her own heritage, but her profligate spending and tin ear to the plight of ordinary people has antagonized many Jordanians.

Many tensions Jordan faces are not Abdullah’s fault: While Jordan has, more than any other Arab state, worked to integrate the Palestinian refugee population, it has also been hit by waves of refugees, first from Iraq and then from Syria. Those working among the Syrian refugees in Turkey and Jordan report that they have not previously seen such a radicalized population. Jordan also does not have the natural resources of some of its neighbors: Saudi Arabia and Iraq are oil-rich and Israel now has gas.

The left-of-center Center for American Progress last week released an excellent new report looking at the pressures Jordan faces as well as the Islamist landscape in the Kingdom. Anything by the Washington Institute’s David Schenker is also worth reading.

An element of blowback also exists. Speaking on the Chris Matthews Show almost a decade ago, King Abdullah II warned of a “Shi’ite crescent,” a specter he subsequently explained in this Middle East Quarterly interview. For those who see an Iranian hidden hand behind every Shi’ite community, Abdullah’s warning had resonance. For Arab Shi’ites, however, it was unrestrained bigotry. Abdullah was not simply content to warn, however. He transformed Jordan into a safe haven for Iraqi Sunni insurgents and spared little effort to undermine Iraqi stability. He, like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was too clever for his own good: By supporting those who justified violence against Shi’ites on sectarian grounds and by working for his own sectarian reasons to undercut Iraqi stability, he set the stage for the blowback which is on the horizon.


1b)  Our Friends the Mullahs

Tehran and the U.S. don't have a shared interest in the Mideast.



Such is America's strategic disarray in Iraq that the Obama Administration has come up with a new version of an old idea—court Iran as an ally. So in order to defeat Sunni extremists who want to form a potentially terrorist state, we are going to get in bed with a terrorist-sponsoring Shiite regime that wants to dominate the Middle East.
"Let's see what Iran might or might not be willing to do before we start making any pronouncements," Secretary of State John Kerry told Yahoo News on Monday in discussing a rapprochement with the mullahs. "I think we are open to any constructive process here that could minimize the violence, hold Iraq together—the integrity of the country—and eliminate the presence of outside terrorist forces that are ripping it apart."

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The mullahs must be astonished at their strategic good fortune. A year ago they were isolated by global sanctions and scrambling to save their endangered client Bashar Assad in Syria. Then President Obama agreed to spare Assad's airfields from bombing in return for promising to give up his chemical arms. The chemicals aren't all gone, but Assad has used the reprieve to retake much of the country.
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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry EPA
Now the sanctions on Iran have been eased as part of nuclear talks, and the U.S. is negotiating to be the air force for Iran's Quds Force that is helping to prop up the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This is the same Quds Force that fashioned the deadly roadside bombs that killed so many Americans after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It is the same Quds Force that arms Hezbollah and Hamas to attack Israel, and the same Quds Force that planned to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in a Washington, D.C., restaurant. In last year's report on "state sponsors of terrorism," Mr. Kerry's State Department noted that the Quds Force "is the [Iran] regime's primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists abroad."
America does have an interest in defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, that has captured much of Sunni Iraq. But that doesn't mean the U.S. has shared interests with Iran in the region. The mullahs consider America the "great Satan" for a reason. The U.S. lost 4,489 troops and spent billions of dollars to make Iraq a unitary, Western-leaning and independent state. Iran wants the Shiite portions of Iraq as a satrapy.
Iran doesn't want the Maliki government to fall, but its approach to ISIS is opportunistic. Early in the war and surely with Tehran's consent, Assad freed Sunni Islamists from his jails and let in foreign fighters. As he knew, the West would be more reluctant to support an extremist opposition. Assad has spared ISIS from his bombing, seeing the moderate Free Syria Army as the greater threat. This is one reason ISIS has been able to create a sanctuary in northeastern Syria that has in turn helped it amass strength in northwestern Iraq.
A Sunni extremist haven in northern Syria and Iraq doesn't necessarily undercut Iran's goal of regional dominance. Its more important victory would be securing even greater influence over the Shiite-dominant portion of Iraq from Baghdad south through the oil fields of Basra and the Persian Gulf.
This would provide strategic depth and sources of revenue. It would also further frighten America's friends in Israel, as well as our Sunni Arab allies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states who will conclude that they must come to terms with a new regional hegemon. The result could be a de facto division of Iraq into three countries—Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite—and a new and greater instability.
No doubt some in the Administration, including President Obama, welcome the outreach to Tehran as a giant step closer to signing a nuclear-weapons deal. But that, too, serves Iran's interests more than America's. Our guess is that America's pleading to Iran for help in Iraq will only make the mullahs more likely to drive a harder nuclear bargain.
The munchkin Metternichs in the White House have even grander ambitions of a U.S.-Iran alliance that will remake the world balance of power like Nixon's breakthrough with China during the Cold War. But that U.S. diplomacy was done to separate a weak China from America's overriding adversary in Moscow. The U.S. was later pushed from Vietnam but stayed in force in Asia. Mr. Obama's courting of Iran is intended to make it easier to fulfill his desire to retreat from the region.

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This outreach to Iran smacks mostly of strategic desperation. It is what an Administration does when it realizes its policy has failed and the damage to U.S. interests is becoming too obvious to hide from the American public. His abdication on Syria created a mecca for jihadists and his total withdrawal from Iraq created a vacuum for regional sectarians and Iran to fill.
Mr. Obama could still save Mr. Maliki and reclaim U.S. influence with a diplomatic and military intervention of the kind that Danielle Pletka and Jack Keane laid out in these pages on Tuesday. But if would have to be a large enough intervention to convince Mr. Maliki that it was worth making political compromises with his Kurdish and Sunni opponents. Nothing in Mr. Obama's more than five years as President suggests he will do anything close. So a-courting the mullahs he goes.
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