The Iraq Mess: Place Blame Where It Is Deserved

With Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, firmly under the control of a jihadi group so extreme that it was denounced by Al Qaeda; with government forces battling for Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein; and with the religious leader of Iraq’s Shiites issuing a call to arms at Friday’s prayers, we have reached the moment that skeptics of the 2003 United States invasion warned about all along: the implosion of the country, and, possibly, the entire region. “The state of Iraq is in imminent collapse,” Faisal Istrabadi, formerly a senior Iraqi diplomat, said on Thursday.

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