U.S. actions in Iraq refute Barack Obama’s fine rhetoric on the spread of ISIS.

President Barack Obama’s decision to help the Iraqi armed forces contain or defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) by sending 300 military advisers and offering intelligence, equipment and other support is fully in keeping with the confused American response to the situation in the Middle East. I give him an A for consistency, and a D for efficacy.

The painful irony of Obama’s speech Thursday night is that everything he said was sensible: ISIS must be contained and defeated, the U.S. military cannot solve Iraq’s problems, Iraq needs an inclusive government and a credible democracy, and regional powers must be involved in a diplomatic process to bring peace to Iraq. Yet the problem that he and Americans seem to refuse to acknowledge is that actual American policies on the ground have led to the exact opposite of these truths. For recent American military and political conduct created the conditions in Iraq for ISIS to emerge, allowed the Iraqis under American rule to fragment and bypass serious pluralistic power-sharing, and stunted any regional diplomacy by refusing to deal seriously with Iran.

American policies in the Middle East reflect confusion and dishonesty, leaving Obama’s sensible rhetoric and analysis invalidated by the impact of American actions on the ground.

Logistically the United States is stuck between not wanting to return its troops to combat (a good decision) and trying to help prevent the spread of ISIS. It is trying to respond to both imperatives, which is impossible to do. It is also hard to see how 300 advisers can make a major difference in the wake of U.S. spending of hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade training and equipping the Iraqi armed forces. Even this limited level of American support for the Iraqi government will make the U.S. appear to be siding with Prime Minister Nouri Maliki in the domestic strife in Iraq – which is the case – and which will make Americans targets for revenge attacks.

Obama continues the prevalent trend in American public politics of totally ignoring the fact that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the single most important factor in the short term in unleashing the forces of violence and sectarianism in Iraq.

He speaks of Iraq as if it were some isolated island untouched by American foreign policy. Refusing to admit the failure of American policy in the period 2003-2012 means the U.S. and others continue those same failures.

Obama correctly noted the centrality of promoting inclusive governance in Iraq as the long-term solution to the problems and threats at hand. Yet he refuses to acknowledge that when the United States had immense, even controlling, influence inside Iraq in the period 2003-2012, it failed to achieve this end, and left behind a wrecked and scarred landscape defined by government incompetence, criminality, corruption and polarization.

Rami G. Khouri is director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.