Two former U.S. ambassadors to Iraq, Ryan Crocker and Zalmay Khalilzad warn that the situation in the region is spiraling downward.
Crocker, who served as chief diplomat in Iraq from 2007 to 2009, warned that Washington is losing the battle against ISIS extremists, and the level of violence in Iraq is likely to get much worse before it gets better.
“Clearly, there has been an incredible deterioration, and deterioration means losing,” Crocker told VOA in a Skype interview.
“As bad as things are today, they’re better than they’re going to be in a month.”
Zalmay Khalilzad said: “You necessarily need to be, given the current trends, pessimistic in the short term because the underlying factors that could shape the circumstances are heading in a negative direction.”
Khalilzad, who was Washington’s ambassador in Iraq at the height of the sectarian conflict from 2005 to 2007, warned that without a regional political solution, existing regional rivalries could conflagrate into a wider, protracted sectarian war.
U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday acknowledged a lot more needs to be done if the United States and its coalition partners want to defeat ISIS.
“One of the areas where we’re going to have to improve is the speed at which we’re training Iraqi forces,” Obama said while in Germany for a meeting of the Group of Seven industrialized nations.
“We don’t yet have a complete strategy because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis,” he said.
Meanwhile, Emma Sky, a former political advisor to U.S. General Ray Odierno, and who served as the Governorate Coordinator of Kirkuk for the Coalition Provisional Authority has said in an interview that the rise of terror group ISIS is the result of allowing Iran to meddle in Iraqi politics at the end of the second Gulf War,
A key mistake made by the West was leaving a power vacuum in the region that was exploited by Tehran, she told the Foreign Affairs website.
The British Middle East expert said: “When you look at Iraq in 2003, the way we went in, there was no plan for what came next. We allowed the power vacuum to emerge, all these armed groups started coming forward, then the debathification, dissolving the military, a lot of people put outside the process started to go into armed groups and end up with the total collapse of the state.
“There are some mistakes on initial years. I think if you look at the period 2007 to 2009, that was only period in the whole war we actually had the right strategy, the right leadership, and the right resources.”
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