US should keep out of Iraq

Los Angeles Times: President Obama said Thursday that the administration was considering “all options,” including military action, to help the government of Iraq fend off advancing Sunni Muslim extremists. But we would be surprised — and disappointed — if the administration injected American forces into a conflict from which the U.S. finally extricated itself only three years ago. Ominous as they are, this week’s developments justify neither American boots on the ground nor airstrikes carried out by American pilots.

This week’s upsurge of violence is partly a spillover of the civil war in Syria — the group that gained control of Mosul and Tikrit is called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — but it also reflects the failure of Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki to establish legitimacy with Sunni Iraqis. It’s thus another reminder of the naivete of U.S. strategists who thought that the sectarian hatreds unleashed by the ouster of Saddam Hussein could be easily subdued in a Western-style democracy.