Tag: Iraq

Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy

Truman Stephens

Obama is perhaps the biggest game changer of our lifetime. Besides being the first African-American president, he enacted numerous major policy shifts and programs such as the Affordable Care Act and a financial stimulus package after the Great Recession, and he made progress in the battle against climate change. Domestic policy is where President Obama has made his biggest waves in the news and his greatest enemies. He struggled to put many of his ideas into action due to two deadlocked Congresses and many strong enemies on the right. His…

How Mosul Can Reshape Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy

Will Kerwick

In mid-June of 2014, smoke rolled into the sky above Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq. Burning Humvees littered streets that had once bustled with people. Only days earlier, the Islamic State had invaded the city, crushing the ill-equipped Iraqi security detail that had been assigned to protect it. The stunning defeat gave the radical group its first strong foothold in Iraq (most of its activity had been in Syria up to that point) and allowed it to use the city as its base of operations in the country. The…

Why Re-Intervention in Iraq is a Strategic Necessity 

Joseph Moresky

Serving as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 until his resignation in 1963, Harold Macmillan was a Conservative pragmatist who arguably faded from popular memory, eclipsed by the towering shadows of figures such as Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill. To the astute, however, he is remembered beyond his record as PM for delivering what is arguably one of the most memorable responses delivered by a politician. Upon being asked by a journalist what he thought would be most likely to derail his government, Macmillan replied in his characteristic…

What’s the Endgame Mr. President?

Libby Wetzler

The United States returns to Iraq less than three years after pulling out the last U.S. troops in what was supposed to be the official end of the Iraq War. In October 2011, as the last of the troops were coming home, President Obama announced that the “tide of war is receding” and that United States would “partner with an Iraq that contributes to regional security and peace, just as we insist other nations respect Iraq’s sovereignty.” It is saddening that these hopes never came to fruition and that only…