Iraq crisis threatens to ignite regional war

Washington is inevitably being drawn back into a catastrophe of its own making.

The final irony is that the can of worms opened by the arrogant criminality of the West has now created the conditions to deny the Americans and their accomplices easy access to the coveted oil.—Eds

By Bill Van Auken, Senior Analyst, wsws.org

After overrunning Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city with a population of roughly 2 million, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a Sunni militia that is an offshoot of Al Qaeda, has continued its offensive, taking Tikrit, the hometown of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and a number of other towns in the Tigris River valley on the road to Baghdad.

The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has thrown Iraqi special forces units along with volunteers raised from the Shia population into a defensive line north of the capital in hopes of breaking the ISIS advance.

The US is reportedly beginning to evacuate some of the thousands of military and intelligence contractors deployed in the country, and there are discussions over what will be the fate of the giant US embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the world. What is unfolding is a monumental debacle engendered by the entire policy pursued by both the Bush and the Obama administrations over the course of more than a decade.

This immense mayhem and destructiveness for all sides—millions of Arab victims, thousands of American soldiers wounded and killed, while engaged in a criminal enterprise, and trillions out the window and down the rabbit hole in taxpayers’ money—is the price paid by policies implemented by the US ruling class and its accomplices in all continents solely in pursuit of financial gain. When are the American sheeple going to rise and say, “