It all depends upon the oil and gas interests. BP Exxon, Shell Gasprom and China are all in Iraq.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are backed and financed by elements of the West. ISIS now may be autonomous.The Pentagon does not want war but the nutter element think they have to defeat Russia and China because the US $ is going down the toilet.

Notice how a little while ago Iran was the pariah state and now are being asked to stabilise Iraq. Some say the USA want to tie Iran up in a fight and eventually destabilise and take its oil.

Gerald Celente said yrs ago that Iraq would descend into chaos and was right yet again.

For war criminal Blair to state that the invasion by the coalition of the killing in 2003 was not responsible for the present situation just means he lives in a parallel universe.
Saddam was not a nice guy but, like Tito, he kept the lid on.
Whether he would still be able to is another question if he was still in power.
Circumstances change.
Methinks the Iraqi people do not have a brilliant future.

Well said Gary.

There is no reason why the state of Iraq should be preserved. The US's idea of bombing them into democracy obviously didn't work. If the configuration of borders ends up being more what the Sunnis and Shias would have settled without outside interference it might be better. And in any event it's hard to see how it can be more be worse than the dog's breakfast that the Middle East has been since the west carved up the Ottoman empire. Even if they fall at each other's throats, the irony is, it has more to do with the ten minutes since the Prophet died, than anything since!

"I understand the temptation to jump in and kill terrorists when the opportunity presents itself"

Excuse me? Please do not encourage the US in its unique and very bad habit of going around the world killing masses of people wherever it feels like. In terms of mass killings, the US has done far more, and more indiscriminately, than ISIS in Iraq. And ISIS is doing what the Declaration of Independence declares they have a right, and a duty, to do, which is throw off an imposed foreign government by force which they have in principle no duty to submit to or obey in the first place. Obviously if they asked permission to be exempted from Iraq's jurisdiction, it wouldn't work: the force they are using is commensurate with that necessary to negate the Iraqi governmental force holding them down to extract obedience and taxes from, as all states do. ISIS is only showing how all states originate.

Arjay
Ironical that the western states invade Iraq over oil while simultaneously destroying and nobbling their own energy industries.

I think the world can expect to see a few alterations to the its map of national borders soon.
In Europe, Crimea and perhaps soon the Donbas will show up as Russian. In the Middle East, Syria will be split between an Alawite homeland in the west, possibly including Damascus and the port of Latakia, and a Sunni state (already declared a Caliphate by the leaders of ISIS) running across the rest of Syria and into northern Iraq. Both these developments are already either done deals or well in hand.
Questions remain. Will the Kurds finally get their own state? I have read somewhere that they are the largest ethnic group in the world not to have a designated homeland. And if they do manage to declare and keep their own state, how much of northern Mesopotamia's oil will they get to keep? And what about the sizable Kurdish populations in northwest Iran and southeast Turkey? Neither Iran nor Turkey have shown much inclination in having their borders redrawn.
Another big question is the future of Jordan. As a state it has always been a bit of rump myth. Israel wants to kick all the Palestinians into it, but they don't want to go. ISIS might like to add it to their Caliphate, but that would bring them perhaps too close for comfort to Saudi Arabia. And the Yanks would lose a training ground for efforts to maintain the myth of "moderate" jihadists.
A prediction: Iran will prosper, and so will Russia.

I am surprised that nobody has explicitly stated the real problem in Iraq and many other countries in the Middle East and Africa for that matter.

Iraq is an artificial country born out of colonial convenience and the natural future for Iraq is to be split in three. Britain and France are mainly to blame for a number of such artificial nations coming into existence in the Middle East, and should admit their role in setting the scene for the inevitable subsequent civil wars.

Bren.
The Sykes-Picot agremeent wasn't an experiment in colonialism, it was a legitimate division of the spoils of war between the victorious parties in WWI.
Of course "colonialism" is only bad if Europeans are in charge right?
The fact that the Turks colonised that whole Mid East region and much of Eastern Europe is irrelevant eh?
Arjay and others.
No, the situation in the middle east isn't America's fault or their responsibility, it's all down to Islam, the Americans and before them the British,French and Turks have all held the eternal Islamic civil war at bay or kept the trouble to a minimum.
Islam is a cancer on the face of the earth, it has to be held back and ruled by divide and conquer tactics under outside forces otherwise Muslim armies explode out of Asia and the Middle East and slaughter every living thing in their path.
If the Europeans and their allies don't break up this ISIS caliphate then within decades Islamic armies will be marching on Athens, Sofia, Belgrade, Budapest...just like the other 500 or so full scale Jihadi excursions into Europe over the last 1400 years.
Stop listening to traitors and self hating Whites, we're not the problem, Islam is the problem.