war in iraq

Obama might talk tough and promise to be “relentless, but the cold hard truth is the US does not care that much about freelance journalists anywhere in the world. It didn’t ask for them to be there, unlike the US ambassador killed in Benghazi, Libya. Forget the government, freelancers don’t even have news organizations that truly have their back. Even a major news organization cannot save you from fanatics hell-bent on making an example out of you as Daniel Pearl discovered in Pakistan. 

The beheading of Foley, a dreadful and tragic event, sparked a surge of gloom, doom, and hype among senior US officials and within the media at large. Of late, estimates of total ISIS fighters and foreign recruits have soared, but are based on what could only be iffy information. This is precisely what ISIS’s leaders intended. ISIS perceives, as do other ruthless entities, that the US (and its allies) are traumatized far more by the death of one citizen than vastly broader atrocities in the Middle East. 

Two-and-a-half years after the U.S. pulled out of Iraq the country has crumbled into a bona-fide failed state, with Baghdad under siege by ISIS (jihadist militants from the Islamic State), who are having a run of Iraq, and some analysts now worry that ISIS will commit mass genocide against Iraq's Shi'a population if Baghdad falls. The war in Iraq started with Operation Shock and Awe but ended in a fizzle and, some would argue, in an epic exercise in human futility. 

The success of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in capturing large territories in Syria and Northern Iraq, and now threatening Baghdad, has raised once again the specter of a Sunni-Shi’a war in the Middle East. Such a scenario is possible, but unlikely. That’s because Sunni and Shi’a believers throughout the world are divided into many factions living under different social conditions and with different religious, social and political agendas. 

The war in Iraq started with Operation Shock and Awe but ended with a fizzle, and, some would argue, as an epic exercise in human futility -- neither victory nor defeat was clear. Instead, with the exit of the last American troops, the final meaning of the war is muddled.  In its wake, the war left us with more questions than answers: Is this the victory we had longed for since Vietnam? Is this all we could muster after we invaded and occupied Iraq for nine years, supposedly to find weapons of mass destruction? Is Iraq now truly a free and sovereign nation, given the unending conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims there?