Let’s do the time warp again.

I’m one of those folks who thought getting rid of Saddam was the right thing to do for his war crimes and democide. What we did thereafter and the failures all along the way have made that decision (and the primary context of regime change due to WMD) look real bad. The surge did enough to extricate the US from the situation, and had Maliki allowed a SOFA where US forces had immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts, this could have been delayed, if not avoided, but that wasn’t to be.

Sending troops back into Iraq isn’t going to solve things because the Iraqis still have to figure it out for themselves. Unless we’re going to have a permanent garrison there, the Iraqis have to solve things and the government there has to figure things out, though the Iraqi people have more or less figured it out for them. They don’t trust the Maliki government to do keep them safe, and the military trusts the government even less. If you want to restore confidence in the government there, it’s going to take not just eliminating the ISIS threat, but restoring professionalism to the military ranks (merit for advancement, and not crony-politics, which is the name of the game for the Maliki government).