A key House panel voted unanimously Dec. 9 to bypass Baghdad and directly arm Kurdish peshmerga forces in their fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS).
The Foreign Affairs Committee bill goes further than previous such efforts by instructing the US president to merely "consult" with Baghdad, effectively cutting Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's government out of the equation. The distinction wasn't lost on the Iraqi Embassy in Washington, which slammed the bill as "unwise and unnecessary" ahead of the vote.