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IPFS News Link • Foreign Policy

America's biggest foreign policy problem: No one trusts America anymore

• theweek.com
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raq is ablaze again. And as is so often true in the Middle East, it looks as if there are no good options.

Doing nothing and allowing an al Qaeda offshoot to set up a terrorist state over half of Iraq is obviously not a good idea. Then again, the U.S. invading Iraq all over again doesn't seem like such a hot idea, either.

Obviously, the Iraq misadventure was started by America's 43rd president, and opposed by its 44th. Nonetheless, it looks like the scale of this new disaster might have something to do with the Obama White House's incompetence and dithering in matters of foreign policy. The administration, for instance, was unable to decide whether it wanted a deal with the Iraqi government on the nature of continuing American presence.

Iraq is fractured by a lethal sectarianism between Shiites, Sunnis, and, to a lesser extent, Kurds. Few Iraqis blindly trust members of the groups of which they are not a part. And it's this lack of trust that is critical.


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