Assholes!

Having screwd the pooch with an ill advised invasion of Iraq--an invasion to find weapons of mass destruction which the United Nations weapons inspectors told us didn't exisit--now these neopconservative idiots want to place blame on Mr. Obama.  More on this later after I calm down enough to write.  But anyone who took time tto investigate in 2002 warned of just this same Shia-Sunni  war in Iraq.

N, even we did not forsee the depth of this disaster.  Al Qaeda did not exist.  Now, a bunch too radical for AllQaeda properf--too RADICAL FOR AL QAEDA, let that sink in for a minute--have used battle experience learned in revolt in Syria to become champion of Sunni cause in Iraq.

The professor Juan Cole explains:
The fall of Mosul to the radical, extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a set of historical indictments. Mosul is Iraq’s second largest city, population roughly 2 million (think Houston) until today, when much of the population was fleeing. While this would-be al-Qaeda affiliate took part of Falluja and Ramadi last winter, those are smaller, less consequential places and in Falluja tribal elders persuaded the prime minister not to commit the national army to reducing the city.
It is an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. There was none. Ironically, by invading, occupying, weakening and looting Iraq, Bush and Cheney brought al-Qaeda into the country and so weakened it as to allow it actually to take and hold territory in our own time. They put nothing in place of the system they tore down. They destroyed the socialist economy without succeeding in building private firms or commerce. They put in place an electoral system that emphasizes religious and ethnic divisions. They helped provoke a civil war in 2006-2007, and took credit for its subsiding in 2007-2008, attributing it to a troop escalation of 30,000 men (not very plausible). In fact, the Shiite militias won the civil war on the ground, turning Baghdad into a largely Shiite city and expelling many Sunnis to places like Mosul. There are resentments.

Those who will say that the US should have left troops in Iraq do not say how that could have happened. The Iraqi parliament voted against it. There was never any prospect in 2011 of the vote going any other way. Because the US occupation of Iraq was horrible for Iraqis and they resented it. Should the Obama administration have reinvaded and treated the Iraqi parliament the way Gen. Bonaparte treated the French one?]
http://www.juancole.com/2014/06/promises-modern-history.html