Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said Tuesday, "Secretary Kerry, in my view, should be on a plane right now for Baghdad."
"Diplomacy is what is crucial right now," Crocker advised. "We need to work with the Iraqis at the highest level. That would be Secretary Kerry, backed by the president, so that they can demonstrate the national unity, Kurdish, Sunni and Shia, that is going to be essential, if there is going to be any hope of turning back the ISIS threat."
Asked whether the Obama administration failed to monitor Iraq over the past several years, Crocker replied, "I would have liked to have seen more sustained high-level diplomatic engagement with the Iraqis. This is a very young democracy that has a lot of challenges. We are hard-wired into their political system. We helped create it, we can't walk away from it. So I would have preferred, since 2011, to see us more deeply and intensively engaged at the highest levels of government. I don't think it's too late, but we better move now."