{"id":52070,"date":"2014-06-23T12:36:33","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T16:36:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=52070"},"modified":"2014-06-23T12:36:33","modified_gmt":"2014-06-23T16:36:33","slug":"kerry-to-maliki-iraq-needs-political-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=52070","title":{"rendered":"Kerry to Maliki; Iraq needs political reform"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Kerry went to Iraq today and spent ninety minutes cloistered with the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki to impress on the newly re-elected politician that his government needs reform to end the al-Qaeda juggernaut sweeping towards Baghdad. Many in the Obama Administration have hinted that Maliki needs to go – I guess they want regime change in Iraq, you know, we’ve heard that before. According to the Washington Times<\/a>;<\/p>\n

al-Maliki has shown no sign of leaving and Iraqi officials have long listened to \u2014 but ultimately ignored \u2014 U.S. advice to avoid appearing controlled by the decade-old specter of an American occupation in Baghdad.<\/p>\n

Still, Kerry appeared encouraged after the discussion with al-Maliki, which ran for a little over 90 minutes and was held in the same complex where an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at former President George W, Bush as an insult in 2008.<\/p>\n

Walking to his motorcade after the meeting, Kerry said \u201cthat was good.\u201d He was being escorted by Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. Kerry also met with the influential Shiite cleric, Ammar al-Hakim, and with Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi, one of Iraq\u2019s top-ranking Sunnis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, this is just more of the Obama Administration’s contention that the problem in Iraq is political not military. While, I’ll admit that the results of last month’s re-election of Maliki’s party to the Parliament may have motivated the Sunni al Qaeda forces to move, only a fool would think that Maliki’s removal would stall or defeat the invasion from ISIS. The only thing those creatures understand is force. I’m pretty sure that they don’t have plans to hold elections if\/when they topple the Iraq government.<\/p>\n

While I don’t support a return to Iraq of US forces to rescue the Maliki regime, I also don’t support talk instead of action at this point. As I’ve written before, the chance to halt al Qaeda’s invasion of Iraq has passed. The Obama Administration had a chance to show that we mean business years ago when the Syrian civil war began. There have been several missed opportunities along the way to prevent the resurgence of al Qaeda in Iraq. But, this administration and it’s agents were always too timid, or too unconcerned, to take meaningful action.<\/p>\n

Carl von Clausewitz once wrote that \u201cGiven the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do a thousand times more damage than audacity\u201d. There should be a picture of the President and his advisers next to that quote. Sending in John Kerry at this point in time, is just more inaction which will only encourage the beasts of al Qaeda as they ravage the Iraqi countryside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Kerry went to Iraq today and spent ninety minutes cloistered with the Iraqi Prime Minister, … Kerry to Maliki; Iraq needs political reform<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}