ways. people who follow the region, people who travel there a lot have been talking about it. america is disengaged. why did we let malaki turn it into a sectarian government to fuel the fire. that was a mistake. why did we do it? in part because we wanted out of iraq. the quickest solution was there. it was a mistake by the bush and obama administrations not to use leverage in terms of our money and resources. we are still spending money there. could we have stayed another 10,000 guy there is? i don t think that s the issue. could we have? that s what people on the right are saying. we should have kept 10,000 there. if george bush couldn t negotiate with malaki, he insisted on a date certain for the u.s. to leave. president obama wanted to renegotiate and the terms weren t acceptable to us and our military commander. i wonder if malaki is happy. he has iran helping, syria helping, us worried. all the cards on his table. he s involved in maybe saving
columns you can t go in with droeps and start killing people. you need good intelligence from the partners on the ground or opera are tifs. i don t think we have the presence we did before. i think you will see a careful stance on the part of this administration. we re going to try to safe guard the threat. do we want to kill arabs again on international television? i am a dove, not a pacifist. why is it in our interest? i go back to what we have been doing for 12 years, killing islamists and arab people on television. do we want to kill isis people? if they are trying to kill us. one of the things president bush and president obama did was the drone strikes which are controversial. but they have stopped attacks on the united states. they are against individuals, not armies. exactly. action here will be very targeted, if at all. by the way, if you re tying to cooperate with malaki government, for them to tell you whom to hit, those aren t the
from a neighborhood or who are already here trying to destabilize the government through terrorist attacks. a senior fellow for the senior for american progress. i want to start with you, brian. in my worst nightmares as a critic of the war from day one when they first started talking about it, when wolfowitz started talking about it. i never thought it would be this bad. a religious war in which we are somehow the bad guys in a country we could have avoided almost sbeerly as a regional pest, iraq. we took a strategy of containing iraq and iran. in 2003 we ended that. what that unleashed in terms of extremism, sectarianism and the violent jihadists we see now controlling the territory there was no isis in iraq. no. it s grown and morphed and is
is there a way to make it better? is it only a question of what price we pay for getting involved once again? let s not forget who created this hell on earth? dick cheney and his vessel george bush who broke apart iraq and the unity of the country who disbanded the iraqi army and left the sunnis angry without jobs, without a government, without hope who are finding their future in the war on malaki. here s how richard engel paints the scene. reporter: it doesn t feel like a city that could fall easily. it feels like a city that s taken its gun out, locked and loadeded it and is holding it in its hands should something happen. people expect there won t be any kind of invasion, that those days may have passed because the communities here have woke up and are now in a strong defensive position. what they do expect is car bombings, assassinations, militants slipping in perhaps
made the strategic decision that we are better off. let s go with the crazy islamic for a while the enemy of my enemy is my friend. now we are in the predicament of having this hobson s choice. we can t support the insurgency. they hate us. the sunnis. maybe they ve got a beef. we can t support the government. they have iranians, assad s on their side. the works we have been fighting since they took over the embassy. the shiites, right? right. where are we? the enemy of our enemy is now our enemy and our friend. we have to be on the same side as iran to stop isis. but we can t be on the same side as iran. the neo-cons and hawks like john mccain are coming out and they are confused. they don t know what to do.