On Thursday, President Obama announced that the United States will send three hundred military advisers to Iraq to help its Army stop the advances of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). At the same time, the President was careful to affirm that the U.S. would not send combat troops to Iraq. On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Steve Coll and Dexter Filkins join host Dorothy Wickenden to talk about the violence that has swept through Iraq in recent weeks and the U.S.’s political and military involvement in the Middle East.

President Obama has said that the solution to the problems in the region ought to be a political one. But Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki “has been sectarian to the core, and that’s really at the heart of this,” Filkins says. “You have to ask yourself the question when you see a meeting like that—Maliki sitting down with the Kurds, Maliki sitting down with a collection of Sunni leaders—is he really capable of reaching out and making a deal with these people after spending his entire adult life going in the other direction? I really don’t think so.”

Coll has doubts, too. “The idea that, under this kind of bloodlust, suddenly people are going to be shocked into coöperation when they’ve had hours and hours of patient negotiations about oil sharing and power sharing, and they’ve not been able to come up with a sustainable arrangement outside of autonomy for the Kurds, just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“From 2003 until today, sectarian conflict in the Gulf region and in Iraq has just gotten darker and darker,” Coll says. No option seems to offer any light.

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Photograph by Ahmad Mousa/Reuters.