The administration's Iraq miscalculation

Washington Post:
How a State Dept. plan to stabilize Iraq broke apart

Hillary Clinton’s political foes have sought to blame her, together with President Obama, for the Islamic State’s stunning takeover of western Iraq.

An intensive review of the record during Clinton’s tenure presents a broader picture of missteps and miscalculations by multiple actors — including her State Department as well as the Maliki government, the White House and Congress.
Congress was mostly a bystander in this miscalculation and to the extent, it was involved at all it was critical of the premature withdrawal.  Obama and Clinton took a gamble and lost it big time.  Maliki was certainly complicit in the debacle, but that should have been anticipated.  They in effect stood by and allowed him to alienate the Sunnis in Western Iraq and were then stunned by its rapid fall to ISIL.

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