Via Andrew Sullivan, here is an admirable quote by Glenn Beck:

From the beginning, most people on the left were against going into Iraq. I wasn’t. At the time I believed that the United States was under threat from Saddam Hussein. I really truly believed that Saddam Hussein was funding terrorists. We knew that. He was funding the terrorists in Hamas. We knew that he was giving money. We could track that. We knew he hated us. We knew that without a shadow of a doubt. It wasn’t much or a stretch to believe that he would fund a terror strike against us, especially since he would say that. So I took him at his word.

[…] Now, in spite of the things I felt at the time when we went into war, liberals said: We shouldn’t get involved. We shouldn’t nation-build. And there was no indication the people of Iraq had the will to be free. I thought that was insulting at the time. Everybody wants to be free. They said we couldn’t force freedom on people. Let me lead with my mistakes. You are right. Liberals, you were right. We shouldn’t have.

He might have added: “And so were you paleoconservatives and others at magazines like TAC, who were demeaned as ‘unpatriotic conservatives’ for your antiwar stance.”

(For the sake of clarity, I was not with TAC back then, and though I cringed at calling TAC editors “unpatriotic,” I thought they were very wrong, and on an important issue).

I bring this up because my Facebook feed is filled with conservatives blaming Barack Obama for the rolling disaster in Iraq today. Some are posting photos of ISIS atrocities and calling Obama a coward for not “doing something” about it. The Wall Street Journal gave Dick Cheney — Dick Cheney, one of the architects of the Iraq invasion! — an op-ed piece to denounce Obama like so:

Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.

Which leads a gobsmacked Jim Fallows to recall Cheney’s words from 2002. Said Cheney back then:

Another argument holds that opposing Saddam Hussein would cause even greater troubles in that part of the world, and interfere with the larger war against terror. I believe the opposite is true.

Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region. When the gravest of threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace.

As for the reaction of the Arab “street,” the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are “sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.” Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.

The nerve of that man, opening his mouth to advise anyone at all about what to do about this Mideast catastrophe that he had a leading role in bringing about.

Look, I don’t follow foreign policy closely enough to say with conviction whether or not Obama is doing the best job he possibly can on Iraq. But I know for a fact that a conservative Republican president caused this mess by invading Iraq (an invasion most Americans, including me, supported at the time), and that there has been for years now little support for continuing US military engagement in Iraq. Obama has been following the will of the American people in this.

The situation in Iraq and in the broader Middle East is horrifically complicated. As the British diplomatic blogger Sir Humphrey writes:

It is also telling the way that despite years of training and support from the West and elsewhere, there has been no real resistance. The concept of Iraq as a bonding factor for the Army to fight for seems to be missing – the polarising factor is the Shia or Sunni militias and groups, which is where the loyalty is being shown. Arguably, until the Army can replace the local Militia as a sign and guarantor of security to the ordinary Iraqi, the prospects for the long term stability of Iraq as a united country are weak.

More widely one has to look at the phenomenally complex diplomatic situation. Some papers are running with the story that the US and Iran could find themselves allied together to stop ISIS. While this is exceptionally unlikely, it does highlight the way that Iran could convert this into a minor diplomatic coup. Its’ no secret that many Gulf states are uneasy at the gentle path of rapprochement between Iran and the West. They also see a growing Shia awareness, and threats to their internal stability – just look at the clashes in Bahrain in recent years. In a region where paranoia, plots and counter plots are the order of the day, it is easy to imagine more vivid imaginations seeing this as a plot between the Iranians and the US to support the Shia, and threaten the stability of Gulf regimes. This may sound far-fetched to Western ears, but never underestimate how paranoid the Gulf is, and how the unlikely is often deemed probable in rulers eyes. Given the decline in US-Gulf relations in recent years, this could be a situation which helps push the relationship to breaking point.

There are no good options for the US here. None. The Maliki government is corrupt and helped bring this judgment upon itself. There is no “Iraq” left to hold together. People who think the United States has the power to impose its will on Iraq are dreaming of an empire that does not exist, and could not exist. Do we really want to have a massive redeployment of US troops into that godforsaken country, to stop a religious war? As John Zmirak writes, there is no hope of stopping these ancient hatreds, no prospect of settling these scores, and no clear American interest in supporting one side over the other. More:

We literally cannot win, which means that we should not fight — or even take sides in this fight. We have no more stake in which intolerant Muslim faction prevails in Iraq than we do in the intra-party struggles in Communist China. Any war which we launched to meddle in the Middle East would fail at least one criterion for a just war: It would have no solid prospect of success. It would be as futile as Guy Fawkes’ bombing of Parliament, or a vigilante attack on an abortion clinic.

What should Obama do? Aside from “stay the hell out,” I don’t know, and neither does anybody else. But at least conservatives ought to have the humility to refrain from blaming him from a situation that was inevitable, arguably from the moment Bush ordered the attack on Iraq, but certainly after the Bush administration signed off on disbanding the Iraqi Army. Obama has a hell of a mess to clean up, and I am certain that no Republican critic of his would have done any better.