... was: all available evidence points to only one conclusion, that the policies and leadership of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki obliterated the security gains of the “surge” and the final years of the U.S. occupation through sheer sectarianism ... ... Iraq—Sunnis in Anbar province in Western Iraq on Syria’s border and in other places—were so fed up with Shiite Maliki’s sectarian policies marginalizing, oppressing, and brutalizing them, that they rose in full rebellion by the end ...
... the “apostate” Shiite regimes there. The two big culminations of these efforts in Iraq were in 2006, when Iraq nearly erupted into full-scale civil war, and in 2014, when ISIS nearly marched on Baghdad after taking much of the country from Maliki’s sectarian Shiite regime. Now, for the past few years, the big magnet for idealistic Muslims willing to use violence in the form of jihad has been the Assad regime: though secular in ideology (Ba'athist), it is headed by Arab Alawite ...
... political agreements being forged by Iraq’s Shiite political leadership—led by Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri Kemal al-Maliki—with the Sunni or Kurdish minorities, agreements that would be key in creating any lasting stability in Iraq, ... ... dramatically improved security as 2011 and 2010, with all three years being the safest in Iraq since before the 2003 U.S. invasion. Yet Maliki, Prime Minister since before the 2007 “Surge,” and his supporters squandered very real, very workable opportunities ...
... This?
At some point during Obama’s second term of his presidency, he and his Administration realized that Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was part of the problem, not part of the solution. It did not help that when the administration realized this, violence ... ... contrary are extremely misleading and ignore the agency and roles of actors such as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Iraq’s Maliki (though it would admittedly be silly to argue that the U.S. does not bear the most overall responsibility for the big-picture ...
