I fully admit to initially supporting the second war with Iraq. I was not enthusiastic about it, but it did appear we could maybe do some good by installing a rational government in Iraq as a counter to Iran and Syria. I never had any illusions about self-government succeeding there. These people are incapable of managing liberal democracy, but they could handle a mild authoritarian state that was friendly to the West.

I assumed the Bush people were going to find a guy with a thick mustache who was happy to do business with us. I also thought they were just trolling thge Letf with all the talk about democracy. They would find a tough guy who would play ball, which has been the American since Monroe. Instead they went for liberal democracy and that was a total failure. Disaster is the right word for it.

Amazingly, it appears the Obama administration has managed to make it worse. This story from the British press suggests Iraq is about to fall, in a fashion similar to what we saw in South Vietnam a million years ago.

America’s plans to fight Islamic State are in ruins as the militant group’s fighters come close to capturing Kobani and have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Iraqi army west of Baghdad.

The US-led air attacks launched against Islamic State (also known as Isis) on 8 August in Iraq and 23 September in Syria have not worked. President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State has not even begun to achieve success. In both Syria and Iraq, Isis is expanding its control rather than contracting.

Isis reinforcements have been rushing towards Kobani in the past few days to ensure that they win a decisive victory over the Syrian Kurdish town’s remaining defenders. The group is willing to take heavy casualties in street fighting and from air attacks in order to add to the string of victories it has won in the four months since its forces captured Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, on 10 June. Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.

In the face of a likely Isis victory at Kobani, senior US officials have been trying to explain away the failure to save the Syrian Kurds in the town, probably Isis’s toughest opponents in Syria. “Our focus in Syria is in degrading the capacity of [Isis] at its core to project power, to command itself, to sustain itself, to resource itself,” said US Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken, in a typical piece of waffle designed to mask defeat. “The tragic reality is that in the course of doing that there are going to be places like Kobani where we may or may not be able to fight effectively.”

Unfortunately for the US, Kobani isn’t the only place air strikes are failing to stop Isis. In an offensive in Iraq launched on 2 October but little reported in the outside world, Isis has captured almost all the cities and towns it did not already hold in Anbar province, a vast area in western Iraq that makes up a quarter of the country. It has captured Hit, Kubaisa and Ramadi, the provincial capital, which it had long fought for. Other cities, towns and bases on or close to the Euphrates River west of Baghdad fell in a few days, often after little resistance by the Iraqi Army which showed itself to be as dysfunctional as in the past, even when backed by US air strikes.

Today, only the city of Haditha and two bases, Al-Assad military base near Hit, and Camp Mazrah outside Fallujah, are still in Iraqi government hands. Joel Wing, in his study –”Iraq’s Security

Forces Collapse as The Islamic State Takes Control of Most of Anbar Province” – concludes: “This was a huge victory as it gives the insurgents virtual control over Anbar and poses a serious threat to western Baghdad”.

The battle for Anbar, which was at the heart of the Sunni rebellion against the US occupation after 2003, is almost over and has ended with a decisive victory for Isis. It took large parts of Anbar in January and government counter-attacks failed dismally with some 5,000 casualties in the first six months of the year. About half the province’s 1.5 million population has fled and become refugees. The next Isis target may be the Sunni enclaves in western Baghdad, starting with Abu Ghraib on the outskirts but leading right to the centre of the capital.

The Iraqi government and its foreign allies are drawing comfort, there having been some advances against Isis in the centre and north of the country. But north and north-east of Baghdad the successes have not been won by the Iraqi army but by highly sectarian Shia militias which do not distinguish between Isis and the rest of the Sunni population. They speak openly of getting rid of Sunni in mixed provinces such as Diyala where they have advanced. The result is that Sunni in Iraq have no alternative but to stick with Isis or flee, if they want to survive. The same is true north-west of Mosul on the border with Syria, where Iraqi Kurdish forces, aided by US air attacks, have retaken the important border crossing of Rabia, but only one Sunni Arab remained in the town. Ethnic and sectarian cleansing has become the norm in the war in both Iraq and Syria.

At some point, Iran gets involved directly. They have no choice. How exactly that works is a mystery, but they are not going to let their Shia brothers get over run by the Sunnis. This is a part of the world with many ancient rivalries, but they have plenty of new ones too. The Saudis and GCC worry much more about Iran than the worry about the lunatics running ISIS. These far flung religious wars are good for business anyway. The Saudis can send their lunatics off to fight and die in Syria or Afghanistan, rather than have them cause trouble in Riyadh.

Iran getting directly involved in Iraq is a bigger concern because it moves them to the head of the class and that puts the Saudi relationship with Washington in jeopardy. It also upsets the Israelis for similar reasons. In a weird way, the success of ISIS is putting everyone on the same side for vastly different reasons, but the Obama administration seems paralyzed right now. Either they don’t know what to do or Obama is too afraid to do anything. It could be both.

As Obama heads into lame duck status, he finds his popularity at home dipping into the 30’s and his party running from him like he is Patient Zero. Usually presidents spend their final two years legacy building with various foreign policy projects. Obama has never had much interest in foreign policy and has proven to be incompetent at it. The world is going to get much worse over the next two years. Maybe untenably worse