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On Iraq, Obama Is A President Without A Plan

President Barack Obama's decision on the limited U.S. intervention in Iraq seems to have no long-term strategy behind it. Even Obama seems to know that.

Obama's speaks from the White House lawn about Iraq, before leaving for vacation.
Obama's speaks from the White House lawn about Iraq, before leaving for vacation.
Nicolas Richter

-Analysis-

WASHINGTON — The U.S. commander in chief is on a two-week vacation in Martha's Vineyard, where he was spotted playing golf over the weekend. In Washington, before the presidential chopper took him there, President Barack Obama quipped that it'd be a little while before he'd be wearing suits again and indicated that the U.S. airstrikes in Iraq could go on for somewhat longer than that.

Three years after the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq, American bombers are again flying missions. It represents the return to a war zone in which the U.S. military fought — tenaciously and at great cost to life — from 2003 to 2011. One of the reasons Obama was elected was that he promised to end the war. And now he has ordered air attacks. But it isn't just his vacationing as planned that demonstrates how he's underplaying the significance of this latest U.S. intervention. He has also laid out very minimalist goals for the intervention.

Assuring Congress that the scale and duration of the intervention were to be "limited," Obama said the main priorities were protecting U.S. citizens in the northern Iraqi town of Erbil as well as thousands of Yazidi people who had fled to the mountains to escape from ISIS terrorists.

An intervention with limited firepower makes sense in the context of Obama's foreign policy — military force as a last resort. In Libya, Obama only stepped in when dictator Muammar Gaddafi"s troops were about to annihilate the rebels in Benghazi. In Syria, he considered the possibility of rocket attacks only after the regime of President Bashar al-Assad gassed its own people.

In Iraq too, it has required a dramatic series of events to mobilize Obama. For months the president has been monitoring how the the Islamist terrorists have been capturing one Iraqi city after another. But only in the past few weeks has the crisis reached such intense proportions that Obama was forced to act.

In Erbil, most inhabitants are Kurds, which is to say faithful U.S. allies, and there is also a U.S. consulate. And while ISIS rebels were sweeping wide swathes of land clear, they were threatening the fleeing Yazidis with genocide. If Obama had let that happen, he probably never would have forgiven himself.

But the president is not beyond reproach. Republican Sen. John McCain accuses Obama of waiting too long and doing too little against "the most powerful terror organization in history" that poses not just a threat to Iraq but also to the United States. Opponents of any new engagements in the Middle East, Obama's political friends among them, fear on the other hand that the United States will once again become disastrously entangled.

Reading the tea leaves

What strategy Obama is following — if indeed he is following one — is unclear to friend and foe alike. Contradictions abound. At the outset, the president's advisers described the military intervention as a reaction to a "one-time" danger. On Saturday Obama said that the problem couldn't be solved in a couple of weeks and there was no time plan. So it could conceivably go on for months, even years.

Obama's priority explanation for the intervention is that protecting U.S. citizens in Iraq, as well as the consulates in Erbil and the embassy in Baghdad, is his "duty." This justifiable reasoning is doubtlessly aimed primarily at the American public, who are not overly interested in Kurds or Yazidis. But what is the logical follow-up to that? That Obama is giving up on the rest of Iraq with the exception of Erbil and Baghdad? What price is he willing to pay to keep his diplomatic bases? What happens if ISIS terrorists aren't stopped by the air attacks, or if they turn off Baghdad's water supply?

All of these questions lead to a larger one: Just how far is Obama willing to go against the ISIS terror group, which now occupies parts of Iraq and Syria and wants to create a "caliphate," a kind of religious state? According to The Washington Post, Obama doesn't have a "credible plan" to deal with this threat. The think tank Center for a New American Security supports a broadly conceived commitment that would vanquish the IS extremists.

Obama asserts that his is a holistic approach and that the Iraqis themselves are responsible for the country's setbacks. From his point of view, Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has excluded and discouraged other groups such as the Sunnis and the Kurds. According to the U.S. president, that's why he didn't send in planes earlier. That would only have taken the pressure off Maliki, Obama told TheNew York Times, and would have encouraged Maliki and other Shia to think, "We don’t actually have to make compromises. … All we have to do is let the Americans bail us out again."

So Obama declared Saturday that the most important agenda was forming a new Iraqi government. To his mind, this is feasible without Maliki and would reconcile the three major groups. A unity government would then lay the foundations for the Iraqi military to solve the ISIS problem itself — with U.S. help. Obama said the U.S. didn't want to play the role of air force to the Kurds or to the Iraqis in general. He was a partner of the Iraqis, he said, but wouldn't do their work for them.

This argument is conclusive in the sense that Obama is selling military aid for the price of political progress. But something else results from it as well: If the Iraqis continue to prove unable to find common ground, ISIS terrorists will rule a considerable part of the country.

In his New York Times interview, Obama also mentioned a lesson derived from the Libyan war. After the military engagement, too little was done to rebuild the society there, and the price for that is being paid now. "So that's a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, "Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer for the day after?""

There doesn’t appear to be one for Iraq.

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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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