Stealing a concept from Charlie Pierce, here is optional music for this post.

A whole bunch of Republicans and neo-cons and other people who have very short memories seem to think we should do something about Iraq. Personally, I think Iraqis should do something about Iraq. Its leader, Nouri al-Maliki, has spent his entire time in office as Prime Minister padding the government with his Shi’a cronies, shoveling Iraq’s resources to them, and excluding the Sunni population (which makes up roughly 1/3 of the country’s people) from anything good which might have come out of the United States’ invasion and occupation of the country. It’s no wonder they’re angry. But because of that anger they also have little interest in helping the government fight back against the insurgents now taking cities right and left. I wonder how many Sunnis are in those army units which have reportedly “fled” or walked away from the ISIS advances.

But the point is we the United States tried to do something about this. We invaded the country on false pretenses, and we got stuck with trying to fix what we broke, but we quit when al-Maliki declined our help after 2011.