IRAQ IS IN REAL CRISIS AGAIN THREE YEARS after US military forces pulled out.

On Saturday, insurgents seized the small town of Adeim in Diyala province 60 miles north of Baghdad, which followed the fall of the major cities Mosul and Tikrit last week. The insurgents are an al-Qaida splinter group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Poor Iraqis, war has again started to devastate their lives. The nightmare all started with the war the United States launched against Iraq in 2003 with the pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which proved to be nonexistent.

US military forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011, leaving this country and its people in constant threat of terrorist attacks. Now whether the current Iraq government can survive remains a question.

If not then who knows what will happen.

US President Barack Obama said on Thursday that "we don't rule out anything because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold either in Iraq or Syria..."

Clearly what the US is concerned about is not the stability of Iraq or the wellbeing of the Iraqi people but whether the jihadists will pose a real threat to the US.

The US, as the world sole superpower, should have a guilty conscience about what has happened to the innocent Iraqi people. The Middle East country would not have been reduced to what it is now, facing the threat of constant terrorist attacks and now engaged in a war with insurgents, had the George W. Bush administration not launched the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

The US should not shirk its responsibility, and it should do whatever it can to restore peace in the country. Besides the military aid the Iraqi government forces need to fight against insurgents, what the country is in urgent need of is a mechanism, which can help the various tribes and religious groups sit down at the negotiating table for reconciliation.

The US should not take for granted that it can accomplish whatever it wants to do with its military might and neither should it believe it can force its values on other countries and peoples with force.

It is high time that US learned the lesson of war it launched in Iraq.

(China Daily USA 06/16/2014 page11)