Iraq asks US to launch air strikes

[karynnj]

23. The US has not been supporting the ISIS/ISIL

At worst, you could say that the civil war there has given them the space, as both the moderate rebels and Assad have fought both them and each other. What is troubling is that there are accounts that the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia have supported them.

Obama has been extremely cautious, for the most part giving the Syrians moderates only non lethal aide. He has at various times said he would allow some lethal arms, but has always been attacked from the right for actually doing very little or none of that. There has always been a concern (HIGHLY JUSTIFIED) that anything they get could end up with ISIS.

In fact, former SoS Clinton has made the point that she disagreed with Obama here. She advocated far more aggressive help than Obama was willing to prove. Her current position is that MORE support for the moderates would have led to a compromise government years ago and not created a space for ISIS to grow. (As always, being on the side not implemented has the advantage that you could assume it would have led to a better outcome.) It is not clear if her position was closer to Obama's or McCain's.

At this point, if you listen to the actual words of Obama (or others in his administration), they are absolutely against re-entering a combat role in Iraq. Obama initially did not rule out other help, but if you listen to his complete comments (or Biden's or Kerry's), they focused on the fact that a large part of the problem is that Iraq marginalized everyone not Shiite. Obviously, in the middle of a civil war, it is hard for a political/diplomatic change (one people like Biden and Kerry called for since at least 2004) to actually be done or be effective. In retrospect, I wish that Biden had been successful in getting Iraq to deal with its sectarian issues before we left in 2011 - though I assume it was not for lack of trying.

As to Syria, it is not clear how responsible US (or SA or gulf state) encouragement to rebel against Assad was in fostering their rebellion. It is clear that SA and the Gulf States provided most of the weapons - likely with our knowledge and unfortunately possibly with our blessing. Our policy since 2013 appears to be to try to get a political/diplomatic solution that is likely impossible given that Assad has no reason to concede anything and the longer it has continued, the more space for the ISIL, who no one supports to gain.