Maliki was the wrong man both for Iraq and the United States, and the administration’s critics argue that after the 2010 parliamentary election in which Maliki lost narrowly to the nonsectarian Iraqi National Movement, American officials could have and should have eased him out. Again, it’s all too easy to exaggerate U.S. leverage. In 2014, Dexter Filkins reported in the New Yorker that Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, brokered a deal among Iraqi leaders to keep Maliki in place. American diplomats then sought to rescue the situation by persuading Maliki to create a new senior post for Iraqi National Movement leader Iyad Allawi; Maliki made sure that Allawi had no real responsibility, and the arrangement quickly collapsed.
But the fact that you can’t do everything doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. Just as Bush virtually abandoned Afghanistan in order to focus on Iraq, the war he really cared about, Obama allowed Iraq to stumble along on its own as he ramped up the “good war” in Afghanistan. Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in 2007-2009, has argued that since the American presence had kept Iraq’s communities from tearing each other apart, “disengagement brought them all back to zero-sum thinking.” Obama believed that Iraqis would not become self-reliant unless they no longer had the United States around to broker all their disputes. The fact that he has now sent 4,500 troops into the country is the most vivid evidence of how very wrong that hypothesis turned out to be.
At a moment when the American people want to turn their backs on the world, to build walls in order to cultivate their own garden, the president has a strong temptation to convince himself that things will work out well enough on their own or even that an American presence is bound to make things worse. That, broadly, is the stance Obama has adopted in both Iraq and Syria. In fact, the U.S. absence has turned out to be even more toxic than the U.S. presence. I honestly don’t know how the next president, even assuming that it’s Hillary Clinton, will be able to persuade the American people that engagement abroad, even in chaotic and ugly settings, works better than disengagement. She’s going to have to try.