Charles Keating was a Navy SEAL, an Arizona native, and 31 years old when he and his Quick Response Force were ordered to help rescue a group of dozen U.S. military advisers who had come under attack by ISIS troops near the Iraqi town of Telskof, 19 miles north of Mosul. The advisers managed to get out alive, but Keating didn’t. When the firing stopped and the smoke cleared, Charles Keating IV was dead: the third American fatality in Obama’s non-war against ISIS.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter called Keating’s death “tragic.” So it is, especially when the war that’s been unfolding in Iraq since 2014 could have been avoided if Obama hadn’t decided to yank every last American soldier out of that unhappy country, setting the stage for political instability and renewed civil war.
But the death of American servicemen in a war that should have ended in 2008, and did end, isn’t the only tragedy unfolding there. We are witnessing a nation in the process of dying, just as so many of its people are; as the effort to save the country from the grip of ISIS is straining its government and society to the breaking point.
Last Saturday, three days before Charles Keating was killed, a mob of demonstrators stormed and occupied Baghdad’s Green Zone — once the bastion of American command and now home of the Iraqi government. They came to protest what they see as a government set on giving away the country to neighboring Iran. The demonstrators are loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, one of those figures in Iraqi politics who keeps turning up in a crisis, like a bad dinar.
Al-Sadr is stouter and grayer than he was a decade ago when he and his militias ruled a large portion of Baghdad and sustained the Shiite insurgency against the American occupation. Back then, al-Sadr was the evident puppet of Tehran; now, his followers are steadfastly anti-Iranian. It doesn’t matter. Al-Sadr is a power challenger, a rebel without a cause, and his reemergence as a force in Iraqi politics is a sign that the country is in deep trouble and that the government is on the brink of becoming a failed state — possibly even partitioned.
At the heart of the problem is the war against ISIS, and the fact that the government headed by Prime Minister Abadi has had to rely on Iran for troops and logistical support to fight the Sunni ISIS militias. This offends the Iraqi Sunnis who are gravitating toward the ISIS cause as well as the patriotic Iraqi Shiites who see Abadi and his predecessor Mouri al-Maliki as nothing more than Iranian puppets. So Sadr’s supporters have been clashing with Abadi’s allies both in Baghdad and in the predominantly Shiite provinces of southern Iraq. Their temporary seizure of the Green Zone (they finally left on Monday), like the storming of the Winter Palace in revolutionary Russia in 1917, foretells the possibility of a three-way war, of Shia versus Shia, and Shia versus Sunnis and ISIS, with the hapless Kurds caught in between.
The real problem, however, isn’t in Baghdad but in Washington: It is Obama’s refusal to step up and increase U.S. support for Iraqis fighting ISIS that has forced Abadi to rely on the Iranians. In fact, Obama has actually encouraged this reliance on Iran, as part of his grand plan to make Iran a partner in building a stable balance of power in the Middle East. Instead, Obama’s pro-Iran stance has bred instability: first in the Arabian Peninsula where Saudi Arabia and Iran are fighting a proxy war in Yemen, but now also in Iraq.
No one should doubt the gravity of the situation in Iraq. As the Abadi government comes apart, Obama’s hopes of defeating ISIS by using Iraqi and Iranian proxies — by remote control, as it were — comes apart, as well. Hopes are fading that forces can follow up on the success of retaking Mosul, or that they can clear out ISIS strongholds around Baghdad. Instead, the Kurdish Perga militia and Iraqi army units may have to intervene in Shia-on-Shia violence in the streets of Baghdad, a scenario that could eventually spell the end of Iraq as we know it — and that could trigger a 1975 Saigon-style evacuation of the 4,000 or so U.S. military advisers and special operators now restationed in-country.
Obama thought that the 2008 victory in Iraq that George W. Bush won, and for which he and Joe Biden quickly claimed credit, was a foreign-policy success they could sit back and enjoy, instead of one they would have to work fiercely to maintain. Their negligence coupled with Obama’s disastrous pro-Iranian turn have turned the country into a desolate battleground once again. By the time Obama leaves office, he not only won’t have defeated ISIS, his “junior varsity” nemesis. He may have signed the death warrant for Iraq.