Alfonse D'Amato

We remain unprepared for the very real threat of ISIS

Posted

Is there a bright light at the end of the ISIS tunnel? The answer is no. News surfaced last week that the Islamic State had captured two more important Arab cities, giving it more revenue to funnel into illegal activities.

This is exactly what the State Department didn’t want. It has focused its efforts on drying up ISIS’s revenue and its ability to sell oil. But the capture of these two cities gives the organization new populations to extort and illegally obtain money from.

The reality on the ground in Iraq is that it has fragmented into three parts: a Shiite east aligned with Iran, a Sunni west now fallen to ISIS and a northern region that is part of an emerging Kurdish nation. The truth is that the country has always been divided along these sectarian lines, held together in the past by the iron fist of Saddam Hussein. In fact, Iraq was a phantom state created by European powers from remnants of the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed after World War I.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in the second Iraq war, President George W. Bush failed to recognize that Iraq could fracture into civil war, and instead unwisely allowed his representative there, Paul Bremer, to dismantle the Iraqi military, which was the only institution capable of holding the fragile country together. Sunnis were enraged, Shiites empowered and Kurds emboldened. The result has been the slow disintegration of the Iraqi nation.

It is not as though this outcome was unforeseeable. As early as 2004, then Sen. Joe Biden suggested that if Iraq was destabilized by a U.S. invasion, it would ultimately have to be divided into exactly the sectarian-based mini-states that are now emerging. For that precise observation, the so-called Iraq experts, who instead led us down a road of chaos and looming failure, pilloried Vice President Joe Biden.

Our ISIS strategy isn’t working. The terrorists are gaining in Iraq and Syria and moving toward northern Syria and the country’s largest city.

ISIS’s threat to our homeland security is very real. It is the most extreme of extremist sects. No one among all the 2016 presidential candidates really knows what ISIS is all about, and not one is qualified to handle the very complex issues of our foreign policy.

Page 1 / 2