Iraq: Obama's Making and Unmaking

What was foreseeable this past winter, when the Nobel Peace Laureate president relaunched the Cold War with his support of a fascist-led putsch in Ukraine, has been verified by a New York Times/CBS News poll. Obama's approval rating at 40% is one point away from the doldrums of the thirties, a level of support which historically has shown a president to be operating without the consent of the governed.

According to Michael Shear and Dalia Sussman in "Poll Finds Dissatisfaction Over Iraq," the capture of large parts of Iraq by uber-Qaeda group Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is the cause of the president's undoing:

The poll found that 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Mr. Obama is handling foreign policy, a jump of 10 points in the last month to the highest level since Mr. Obama took office in 2009. The spike in disapproval is especially striking among Democrats, nearly a third of whom said they did not approve of his handling of foreign policy.

Fifty-two percent of Americans say they disapprove of how the president is dealing with the current violence in Iraq (including about a third of Democrats); 37 percent approve. 

“I voted for him because he said, ‘Give me four more years and I will fix everything,’ but nothing is being fixed,” Michelle Roberts, 34, a Democrat from Salem, Mass., said in a follow-up interview. “I understand he wants to fight terrorism, but send in robots, drones. Don’t send in our troops. Our men and women are dying for what?” 

The erosion in support across both parties has contributed to a drop in Mr. Obama’s overall rating that threatens to undermine his administration’s political ambitions during the remaining two and a half years of his second term. The president’s approval rating is now at 40 percent, while 54 percent say they disapprove of the job he is doing in office, a six-point jump since May.

As Obama teeters on the brink, one step away from the point of no return, the indicator that bodes ill for his remaining time in office is the jump in his disapproval rating to 54%. One could argue that Obama has lived on the edge of low-forties approval since his disastrous flirtation with bombing Damascus at the end of summer last year and he has always managed to survive. But disapproval ticking closer to a super majority is proof that attitudes are hardening towards the Nobel Peace Laureate.

Another key passage by Shear and Sussman is the confusion that dominates the electorate:

Although the survey suggests that Mr. Obama’s small steps toward military action in Iraq are in line with those of many Americans, it also indicates that people may still yearn for their commander in chief to manage foreign crises, even when the solutions are not obvious to them. A large majority thinks that the United States has important interests in Iraq’s future. Two-thirds said Mr. Obama had not done enough to explain American goals in the country.

This confusion is the result of a people being indoctrinated for the better part of two decades to believe that Wahhabi-style Islam of the type practiced by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden is the greatest enemy to the United States. Yet Obama and his Secretary of State Kerry spend the majority of their time so far talking about malign Iranian and Syrian influence and lecturing the one-time U.S. favorite Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's head of state, that he has to go because he is too sectarian. And all the while there is not one word (other than some ass-covering by an "unnamed senior official" saying that the administration is aware of the problem) about the robust support ISIS receives from the Gulf Sheikhdoms. No wonder people are confused.

People are confused because Obama is playing a game, pretending that the foe is still Al Qaeda and its ilk but the administration's enemy of choice is actually Iran and the states aligned with Iran in the Middle East, Iraq and Syria. A good indication of this can be found in the administration's non-existent reaction to the news that Iraq's border crossing with Jordan has been captured by ISIS. If there were any real threat to Jordan there is no doubt that the Salafis occupying the crossing at Trebil would be blown to smithereens by U.S. aircraft.

More and more the assessment from the first days of ISIS's blitzkrieg capture of Mosul -- that what is happening in Iraq is a planned partition of the country -- seems to be the accurate one. A new secret agreement to carve Iraq into a Kurdish state as well as a Sunni caliphate encompassing parts of Syria while leaving the Shia the rest is in the offing. Call it a centennial overhaul of Sykes-Picot.

And it will be the final nail in Obama's presidential coffin. A guy who rose to power in the Democratic Party based on his pacific stance on the Iraq War is presiding over its bloody destruction. And the carnage and mayhem have just begun. There is no telling how bad things are going to get.

It is hard to say if it will be the wholesale undoing of the Democrats. We can only hope that moribund progressives and liberals will rise in mass and vacate the party.