June 19 at 6:15 PM


President Obama came nearly full circle on Iraq on Thursday, sending military advisers back to cope with that country’s disintegration as U.S. officials lobbied for replacement of the prime minister that the United States helped install. These were the right choices, but they were a measure of how badly U.S. policy has gone awry.

Obama has concluded that Iraq faces all-out civil war and partition unless it replaces Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with a less sectarian and polarizing leader. U.S. diplomats are floating the names of alternative candidates in Baghdad. Meanwhile, Obama is sending up to 300 military advisers to assess if the Iraqi army can be salvaged after it collapsed in Anbar province, Mosul and Tikrit.

The people who will pull the plug on Maliki are Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and other Iraqi kingmakers. The United States is pushing them to signal unmistakably that Maliki is finished.


Obama knows this silent putsch will succeed only if it has tacit support from Iran, which effectively has a veto on the next Iraqi prime minister.

One sign of Iran’s hegemony is that Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, was said to have flown this week to the northwestern city of Tal Afar, near the border with Syria, to assess the battle there against Sunni extremists.

To create a broad-based Iraqi government that can fight the brutal insurgency led by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the United States and its allies need to quickly gain the support of Iraq’s Sunni tribal leaders. I met with several of them in Amman two months ago, and it was clear that, although frightened of ISIS’s power, they were using it to attack Maliki. This Sunni opportunism can be reversed. The tribal leaders told me they want U.S. help, and they should get it.

My memory seems to be failing here. Can anyone remind me how long has Iran been our political ally?