West of Eden: If Abadi meets a body

Mongol army besieging Baghdad, 1258. Image by Sayf al-dīn Waḥīdī. Herat, 1430, from the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons.

Hope nobody's freaking out over the idea that 450 more US military trainers being sent to Anbar means it's Vietnam all over again, an inexorable quagmirization of what almost got to not be a quagmire.

To my mind the right take is that of Juan Cole:
Modest Increase in Iraq Training Mission shows Obama still Uninterested & Maybe he’s Right

It's not a military escalation at all. It's a message to Prime Minister Abadi over his failure to perform his own designated task of reforming the Baghdad government and integrating Sunni Arabs into the power structure, that the US cannot take care of his problems: Obama is also speeding up direct delivery of matériel to the Sunni tribal militias and Kurdish peshmerga instead of waiting for the Baghdad government to take care of that, and the advisers in Anbar are going to be concentrating on doing the integration themselves, since Baghdad won't:

The focus for the Americans will be to try to accelerate the integration of Sunni fighters into the Iraqi Army, which is dominated by Shiites. That will be an uphill task as many of the Sunni fighters in the area do not trust the Iraqi Army.

It's not much, either, as Cole notes. What's important about it is just that Abadi isn't getting any of it. That goes along with Obama's spectacular and very enjoyable on-camera dissing of Abadi in the Awkward Moment:

(Jon Stewart seemed to be thinking the American news media were reading too much into this video, but that's because the news media never thought to discuss why the president might be interested in disrespecting the prime minister in public, or even to suggest that there might be a serious reason, and it didn't occur to Stewart to ask—it's because the prime minister has been totally unwilling to keep his commitments, and continues to beg for money regardless. It wouldn't have bothered G.W. Bush, who would have just written a check, but Obama wants to do something about it.)

As I keep saying, and as I believe Obama understands with exceptional clarity, the solution in Iraq and Syria is necessarily a political solution, which means stakeholders recognizing their need to ready themselves for a future in which they all live together peaceably by working together now, and until Abadi or one of his successors figures it out nothing is really going to get better. Sorry about what it's doing to Lindsey Graham's diaper bill, but US troops are not the answer.