Secretary of State John Kerry's trip to Iraq will be as effective and fruitful as his trip to Israel-Palestine was earlier this year.
The US-led Israeli-Palestinian peace process is now dead. And the government that the U.S. created in Baghdad is also now dead. It is a zombie government, a ghost government. I remember reading somewhere that most Iraq MPs don't even live in Iraq but in the Gulf states for the majority of the year. So its politicians are crap. And its soldiers are worse. Its soldiers remove their uniforms and disappear into crowds when the enemy approaches. That's all the evidence you need to know that the Iraqi military as currently managed is done. Most of the competent fighting against the new ISIS threat is being done by motivated Shiites recruits and experienced Shiite militia fighters, not corrupt Iraqi soldiers and officers, many of whom signed up just to make money.
Maybe Kerry's private opinions on Iraq differ from his public statements. Let's hope so, because if the chief diplomatic spokesman of the United States still believes in the idea of a "unity government" in Iraq then the problems of Iraq will never be genuinely solved. The Obama administration is taking a band-aid strategy towards the crisis in Iraq, which is worse than doing nothing.
