Inside 'Antiwar' Obama's Push for Regime Change in #Iraq

Heh, you gotta love it.

Obama, the most far-left Senator in the Congress in 2007, campaigned against the Bush administration's policy of regime change in Iraq, and especially against the successful Petraeus surge, is now being reported as having an aggressive policy of toppling Shiite Iraqi dictator Nouri al-Maliki.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

From Eli Lake, at the Daily Beast, "Exclusive: Inside Obama's Push for Regime Change in Iraq":

ICYMI my piece on how Obama’s new Iraq war is both undeclared and more expansive that he first said. http://t.co/OaM3CUo3NA

— Eli Lake (@EliLake) August 11, 2014

No, Obama has not proposed toppling Iraq’s government by force like his predecessor once did. But the president has instructed his diplomats in Washington and Baghdad to find an alternative to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Since June those diplomats have quietly supported a member of Maliki’s own political party to be the next prime minister. On Sunday, the effort appeared to pay off, when a majority of Shi’ite politicians threw their weight behind Haidar al-Abadi, leading to Iraq’s president to instruct him to begin forming a new government.

“We have been working very quietly on the ground and sending messages to various parties that al-Abadi is a viable alternative,” one U.S. official told The Daily Beast.

The American push—which has not been previously reported—wasn’t the only factor that led to al-Abadi’s rise. Iraq’s deterioration in recent months led some of Maliki’s Shi'ite backers to pull their support of him. Last month, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most senior cleric of the Shi'ite sect, wrote a letter to Maliki asking him not to seek a third term as prime minister.

But al-Abadi has been the United States’ preferred candidate since late June to replace Maliki, a man who Obama himself blamed over the weekend for creating the conditions for the current catastrophe that is engulfing Iraq. U.S. and Iraqi officials tell The Daily Beast that U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Robert Beecroft and Brett McGurk, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran, have pushed Iraqi politicians behinds the scenes to consider al-Abadi as a new Iraqi head of state.