What happened next was stunning: ISIS, with some 4,000 fighters, routed an Iraq Army that has more than 200,000 active-duty soldiers. Several divisions disintegrated.

That’s where Prime Minister Maliki comes in, for this is a political, not military, story. For several years, Maliki has systematically marginalized Sunnis, weakened Sunni Awakening militias that had been a bulwark against extremists, and undermined the professionalism of the armed forces. Some Sunnis so feared their own government that they accepted ISIS as the lesser of two evils.

So Maliki created his own nemesis and ignored danger signs, blindly proceeding without wanting to hear the truth. In all this, he echoes Saddam Hussein.

In 2002, in the Saddam era, I published a searing anti-Saddam column while I was in Iraq. A senior government official summoned me to his office in Baghdad, as a portrait of Saddam stared down at us, and began a threatening tirade. It became apparent that this official hadn’t actually read the full column, so I nervously asked my Iraqi interpreter to read it to him in Arabic.

I was paying my interpreter a hefty daily rate, and, for financial reasons, he didn’t want to see me expelled or jailed. So, in rendering my column into Arabic, he skipped whole paragraphs and turned it into mush. Deflated, the government official let me off with a stern warning, and I was reminded of how megalomaniac regimes mislead themselves. In the same way, Maliki probably had no idea that his Army was crumbling.

As the United States debates what to do, let’s remember Maliki’s central role in all this. Hawks are right that Iraq could be a catastrophe. We could see the establishment of a terrorist caliphate, untold deaths, soaring oil prices, more global terrorism.

In that context, hawks favor American airstrikes. But such strikes also create risks, especially if our intelligence there is rusty. And while airstrikes might be necessary to slow ISIS, they’re not sufficient.