An Iraq reminder

Eleven years after this country invaded and three years after our departure, civil war in Iraq is climaxing. Sunni-led rebel groups in the north seized the country’s second largest city, Mosul, last week. The Iraqi army, under the command of the Shiite-led government, by all accounts ran away, leaving American-provided artillery and Humvees in its wake.

Now, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or the ISIL, is threatening to converge on Baghdad and oust the U.S.-backed Nouri al-Maliki government.

There’s so much to be learned from all this. But there’s also some basics that we need to understand before our leaders make more (hopefully not catastrophic) decisions about what to do in Iraq.

First, ISIL is not al-Qaida. The two groups struggle for power, and the latter group absolved themselves earlier this year. Why is this important? Well, when the traditional media says that al-Qaida terrorists are overtaking Iraq, they’re wrong.

Two, a military solution is not the answer. All the drum-banging in Washington, D.C., this week to bomb the hell out of the rebels will just escalate the danger.

Instead, the Shiite-led central government needs to reform. It needs to extend an olive branch to the Sunni and Kurds of the north. It needs to change.

Three, here in this country, it is not time for a blame game. The GOP is fingering the Obama administration for this mess, saying it mishandled the troop withdrawal. Dems, needless to say, blame the Bush-era leaders.

Let’s not be so dense. It takes five seconds to Google the 29 U.S. senators and president who started the war in 2003. We could, of course, revisit that folly—which included then-Sen. Hillary Clinton voting for the war—but that won’t help us make smart decisions.

Internationalism and inclusivity are the answers to avoiding a disastrous civil-war endgame in Iraq.