Why the Heck Did We Leave Stinger Missiles Behind in Iraq?

Few stories are as worrisome as the one we’ve been hearing about in the past several days, detailing stinger missiles that we have inexplicably left behind in Iraq. Those missiles have now likely fallen into the hands of Sunni insurgents and ISIS fighters, and as CBS’s Lara Logan reported over the weekend, the existence of those weapons essentially removes America’s “dominance of the skies.” Logan called them “the best that we have to bring down aircraft,” and now that the baddest of the bad guys in Iraq have them in their possession, it’s going to make it virtually impossible for us to ensure safety if we decide to engage in airstrikes over the region. Weapons on the ground are one thing, but take away our dominance in the air, and the United States loses quite a bit of its advantage in this rapidly disintegrating crisis.

The stinger missile is a shoulder-fired surface-to-air weapon, and as General Bob Scales points out in the clip above, it is SUPER EASY to operate. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Bill Cowan added, “I can’t conceive the thought process that went behind giving the Iraqis — whether we knew this was going to happen to them or not — giving them stinger missiles which should, at all times, be tightly controlled.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you can’t write this stuff. The careless actions of this administration on the world stage have made winning a near impossibility. In this case, they cut and run from Iraq so quickly that they didn’t even bother to bring the weapons home. A bit ironic, considering the fact that Weapons of Mass Destruction were the very reason we got involved over there in the first place.

It appears that all possible paths to success in the Middle East are littered with the remnants of Obama’s failures, and just when you might think to yourself, “well, at least there’s always airstrikes to avoid another ground war,” something like this happens to shatter that as a potential option. Thanks a lot, guys.