Islamists Ready To Pounce As U.S. Lowers Flag In Iraq

Mideast: Our premature departure from Iraq tells the world that the U.S., as in Vietnam, can't finish big jobs. But far worse, it opens the door to a nuclear-armed, pan-Islamist empire led by Iran.

Why, as Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported Thursday, did Iraqi leaders opt out of the official end-of-war ceremony in Baghdad?

Well over 4,000 U.S. servicemen and women gave their lives to free Iraq from Saddam Hussein, and some 32,000 were wounded over nearly a decade of war.

Shouldn't the elected representatives of the Iraqi people have been there to express their personal thanks?

After all, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told U.S. personnel they could now leave the ancient, storied land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers "secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people to cast tyranny aside, and to offer hope for prosperity and peace to this country's future generations."

Clearly, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, President Jalal Talabani and many other officials within the nation's embryonic republic see the writing on the wall.

They understand what President Obama does not seem to: that Iraq in its current state is far from secure; and that America's sacrifices may have ended Saddam's tyranny, but that future generations of Iraqis — and very possibly the present generation — may find themselves under the thumb of foreign invaders.

Talabani, a Kurd, is on record saying that all of Iraq's political factions except those connected to the Mahdi army of Shiite warlord Muqtada al-Sadr wanted some U.S. troops to stay and continue to train Iraqi forces.

The anti-U.S. Sadr, who after President Bush's surge enjoyed years of hospitable exile in Iran, still runs a large part of southern Iraq. With Tehran's help, he can be depended on to engage Iraqi forces. The use of roadside bombs, rockets and other advanced weapons by Iranian-backed insurgents is already on the way up.

Before the genius Obama put in charge of Iraq became vice president, Joe Biden wanted to divide the country into separate entities. Today, the threat is the opposite.

The ancient land of Mesopotamia stretched out from present-day Iraq to include parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey. Pan-Islamists seeking legitimacy for their aggression, and soon to be armed with weapons of mass destruction, may soon point to those political boundaries of past millennia as a basis for an Iranian-Syrian empire that engulfs Iraq.

Meanwhile Israel — the only nation in the region with real, long-term democratic legitimacy — will be accused of being an artificial Western creation.

When asked during a press conference with Maliki at the White House on Monday if he still thought Iraq was "a dumb war," as during his 2008 campaign, Obama had a strange reply: "I think history will judge the original decision to go into Iraq."

At the bottom of Obama's Iraq strategy seems to be an obsession with proving George W. Bush's "original decision" wrong, instead of preventing the fall of the jihadist dominoes in the oil-rich Middle East.