The War #Obama Once Called 'Dumb' Looms Large Again

At the Washington Post, "For Obama, Iraq looms large again":

President Obama inherited two wars on taking office, one he called “dumb” to his political benefit and the other he described more urgently as “the war we need to win.”

It is the dumb one today that poses the most immediate challenge to his national security priorities and to his foreign policy legacy.  Iraq is splintering, and with it both the original neo-conservative belief that a sectarian dictatorship could be made quickly into a stable democracy and Obama’s hands-off approach to the wider region.

The Islamist insurgents now seizing cities across Iraq’s battered north grew up in Syria, whose civil war Obama has steadfastly avoided despite the grave risks it poses to the region’s delicate stability.

Those threats of a wider regional war have been given shape. In recent days, armed Islamists spanning the Syrian border have seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and a string of Sunni Muslim towns, long estranged from the Shiite-led central government, that run south to the edge of Baghdad. Turkey and Iran may intervene to protect their political and security interests, and Iraq’s Kurds have moved into the long-contested city of Kirkuk, which was abandoned by the Iraqi army.

Now a president elected to end the United States’ wars faces demands, in Washington and in Baghdad, to rejoin the one he long condemned and had thought was over. The expected line of his presidential legacy — Obama as the commander in chief who brought to a close the nation’s post-Sept. 11, 2001, conflicts — is threatened now to include an asterisk...

Well, O's gonna have an asterisk alright, indicating how his presidency was the worst administration in generations, one whose legacy will be the biggest repudiation of far-left ideology since the Johnson administration's failed "war on poverty" and Jimmy Carter's years of "malaise."

See also Pamela Geller, "Obama: 'The World Is Less Violent Than It Has Ever Been."