Questions for Obama as extremists head for Baghdad

Iraq was not Barack Obama’s war and he was elected after promising to end it. But a US president with a track record of resistance to military excursions in Muslim lands cannot dodge the judgement calls he now has to make.

What can he do to roll back the forces of Sunni Islamic extremism apparently heading towards Baghdad?

We know the kinds of wars Barack Obama would prefer to wage. From Yemen to Somalia, Afghanistan to Pakistan – bespoke Special Forces operations, limited in scope, backed by drone strikes.

Questions for Obama

Aside from tactical considerations – and the distinct possibility of triggering a refugee crisis through any large scale military action – here are a couple of questions which need to be asked first.

Is Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nuri al Maliki, a man worth fighting for? In the recent past, Mr Obama has rejected Mr Maliki’s requests for air strikes, which might suggest that maybe the White House’s answer to that question is “no”.

Although the prime minister’s coalition won the most votes in this year’s election, he has yet to form a government and is so despised by his opponents for his allegedly dictatorial style that he may not be able to do so.

The fact that only 128 of 325 Iraqi MPs showed up to vote yesterday on a state of emergency is surely the first chapter in Mr Maliki’s political epitaph.

Surely the priority now is not military action so much as a massive diplomatic effort to help form a unitary government in Baghdad – unless the judgement call is that this cannot be achieved any more.

What are the realistic prospects of preserving Iraq as a unitary state, when its three main sectarian groups, Sunni, Shia and Kurd, have been unhappy bedfellows ever since Iraq was created?

Colonial borders

It is easy to blame the Iraq war and the toppling of a dictator for today’s chaos. Those who opposed that war rarely lose an opportunity to tell us how right they were.

But talking to Kurdish leaders here in northern Iraq, you understand better that Iraq’s fissures go back many decades. I took tea with the regional government spokesman here, Safeen Dizayee, who sounds like a man who believes Iraq has been tried and tested and failed.

I also met Qubad Talabani, the son of Iraq’s president, yesterday. President Talabani, a Kurd, has been receiving medical treatment in Germany for several months and his son told me there is “no date set” for his return.

If Mr Talabani does come home, I am beginning to wonder if the country he left behind will still be there to greet him as national figurehead. I have known Mr Talabani for years, a man full of laughter and larger than life, and his tragic illness and absence only seems to add to his country’s malaise.

It has been a given of British and American foreign policy that the borders created by the colonial powers after the first world war should be preserved. But with no prospect of foreign troops arriving to preserve those borders, whether that goal is achievable now is too hard to tell.

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