Another Hillary Clinton in the latest document dump from Wikileaks puts Hillary Clinton’s one-hydrogen-molecule-deep understanding of the regional war she ignited on display and shows why she is simply not competent to be president. Her solutions for ISIS might be appropriate for a C student in an undergraduate international affairs seminar but for someone who was, allegedly, Secretary of State for four years it is a pathetically ignorant and politically tone-deaf performance right up to the point where she confesses to wanting to extend the war in Syria. At that point it becomes criminal.

I expect this on the internet but not from someone who is proposing US foreign and defense policy. Iraqi Kurdistan is part of Iraq. Without active Iraqi cooperation, it is not possible to supply and sustain the Peshmerga. The quickest way to dispense with that cooperation is by building a Kurdish Army that will actively compete with the Iraqi Army… and its masters in Tehran… for supremacy in areas such as Mosul which used to be Kurdish until Saddam Hussein’s ethnic cleansing. As an aside, someone should ask Hillary why the Iraqi Army is performing so poorly and if it has anything to do with the US running for the doors to satisfy an Obama campaign promise.

If the policy of the United States is the dismemberment of Iraq, then this is a grand way to proceed. Unfortunately, that is not our policy under Obama nor would it be our policy under Clinton. The blithe assumption that providing the Kurds with armor and artillery, and presumably the training to use it, will result it in being employed exclusively against ISIS is wishful thinking of the type that brought us the Arab Spring.

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Is forcing Turkey out of NATO part of Clinton’s objective? If so, then this is the way to do it. She sees the Peshmerga as a tool that can be used to serve her ends and it apparently never occurs to her that the goals of the government in Iraqi Kurdistan might possibly extend to the establishment of a Kurdish state embracing chunks of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. The Turks are complete right. Weaponry provided to the Peshmerga will inevtitably be used in Turkey because one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, right? Disregarding the wishes of a NATO ally that is already flirting with a Russian alliance on issues of its own domestic security is boneheaded stupidity at its worse.

This is lunacy on so many levels. The reason Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding ISIS is as a counterweight to Iranian influence. It is a falling out of Islamic radicals. They have no incentive to respond to US pressure because the survival of their regimes are at stake. We can’t operate in the region without access to their bases. Note how Clinton blithely elides over expanding the war in Syria once ISIS is defeated. Her endgame remains the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria. A regime that has the backing of Russia and Turkey and Iran. A regime for which there is no logical successor government to fill the vacuum. Was she in a drunken stupor in 2003-2004?

Clinton plans to address the concerns of all our regional allies and pseudo-allies using fairy dust and unicorn farts

Based on what the region has seen of our behavior, who in their right mind is going to give their assurances. Why would the Iraqi government, in particular, believe them after the way we abandoned them to their own devices? Doesn’t this woman think that they might be a tad suspicious when we are arming the Kurds and demanding more autonomy for them and training them and advising them? Did the Kurds buy into this deal?

What Clinton is recommending here is a long term regional conflict with no endgame that leaves us devoid of allies or even nodding acquaintances in the region. Her plan to follow up a prospective defeat of ISIS with another war directed at the overthrow of Assad, disregarding the geopolitics of both Russia and Turkey being against that outcome, is a guaranteed foreign policy and humanitarian disaster. Clinton is ignorant of the situation in the region, she has a view of US power than was destroyed in 2009, she has no ability to see the truckload of unintended consequences that will come from this strategy. What is worse is that she is totally unaware of her ignorance. This makes her at least as dangerous at Donald Trump.