... Obama is a sunni muslim, so that explains it.
Looks like any where in the southwest
Whereas pulling them all out had no effect....riiight.
All Bush, all the time...
Obama built this all by himself.
Simple. Greedy, corrupt, Marxist politicians on Capitol Hill is what happened in Iraq. The American people should shove their “rules of engagement” up the politicians @$$es. Their idiotic and moronic “ROEs” have killed more American military personnel than all of our enemies put together.
“””When the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, Americans were told it would be a quick, simple project.”””
Actually W said the war on terror would be a long hard fight. But let’s keep facts out of it.
How many days before we captured Baghdad in 2003? We did in fact reach our initial military goals in days and weeks. Record time, btw. What we did not plan for was the insurgents that started immediately. The military action to move and take Baghdad was as good or better that expected. Even with setbacks like out northern divisions being locked out by turkey at the 11th hour. Not to say we didn’t account for what’s next to the criticism of all levels on the military from planners all the way up to the White House.
We needed to take over this country and sit on their heads, for several generations. If we were not willing to do that we just should have bombed the heck out of them and left it at that.
I keep thinking about that Ann Coulter column that got her fired from National Review. Of course the part the freaked them out was “convert them to Christianity”.
But we didn’t need to actually change their religion, but we sure as heck needed to change their culture.
Invade - sure, kill leaders - sure, change the culture - NO! That would be racist.
So, you know, here we are.
And I am really sick of hearing that we needed to get out, get out.
How long have we been in Germany, Korea, Japan?
That’s how long we needed to stay in Iraq, Afghanistan and quite frankly we should have gone on to Syria, etc.
I think Bush blew it the night of 9/11 when he couldn’t wait to say “Islam is a religion of peace”. He should have said “tonight we declare war on Jihadis”.
...which the Clintons during the 90's consistently claimed were there.
Funny how they always leave that detail out.
I love how it is now Bush who ended the Iraq War. Amazing!
Someone explain to me what the point is of this trio finding it nesessary to look like topsy, bopsy, nopsy, parroting out some benign statement or other, trio style?
So Obama got to take all the credit for a stable and functioning Iraq. Even saying it was one of his “greatest achievements.” Then when it all blows up, thanks to leaving no residual force, he goes on a golf trip. And the media blames Bush. Amazing.
We pulled out too soon and didn’t let the government stabilize. Had we stayed a year or two more, perhaps things would have been different.
E*X*C*L*U*S*I*V*E
Once again George H.W. Bush takes to the skies!
Using a stunt double for his birthday leap as cover, Bush the Elder once again used his CIA Director card to wrangle an SR-71 spy flying at ten times the speed of sound made his HALO jump over Iraq with his Halliburton body guard.
This is the end of Iraq as a country. We're going to see at least three new "countries" out of it - a Kurdish state, a Sunni Arab state, and at least one Shiite state.
The “war” lasted what, 21 days?
Of course to these guys, one US soldier carrying a rifle and battle rattle means “WAR! Booga booga!”
What went wrong was mismanagement and excessive lenity in the occupation.
And, of course, withdrawal of forces from what amounts the defense of Iraq from its own enemies (int- and external).
Revisiting Seymore Hershs’ article from 2007. It seems this policy of “redirection” has continued through 0bama. And it’s falling apart.
THE REDIRECTION
Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?
http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all
A STRATEGIC SHIFT
“In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy.
The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.”
After the revolution of 1979 brought a religious government to power, the United States broke with Iran and cultivated closer relations with the leaders of Sunni Arab states such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. That calculation became more complex after the September 11th attacks, especially with regard to the Saudis. Al Qaeda is Sunni, and many of its operatives came from extremist religious circles inside Saudi Arabia. Before the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Administration officials, influenced by neoconservative ideologues, assumed that a Shiite government there could provide a pro-American balance to Sunni extremists, since Iraq’s Shiite majority had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. They ignored warnings from the intelligence community about the ties between Iraqi Shiite leaders and Iran, where some had lived in exile for years. Now, to the distress of the White House, Iran has forged a close relationship with the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
The new American policy, in its broad outlines, has been discussed publicly. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,” separating “reformers” and “extremists”; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were “on the other side of that divide.” (Syria’s Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, “have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize.”
Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.
A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee told me that he had heard about the new strategy, but felt that he and his colleagues had not been adequately briefed. “We haven’t got any of this,” he said. “We ask for anything going on, and they say there’s nothing. And when we ask specific questions they say, ‘We’re going to get back to you.’ It’s so frustrating.”
The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney. (Cheney’s office and the White House declined to comment for this story; the Pentagon did not respond to specific queries but said, “The United States is not planning to go to war with Iran.”)
The policy shift has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic embrace, largely because both countries see Iran as an existential threat. They have been involved in direct talks, and the Saudis, who believe that greater stability in Israel and Palestine will give Iran less leverage in the region, have become more involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations.
The new strategy “is a major shift in American policy—it’s a sea change,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. The Sunni states “were petrified of a Shiite resurgence, and there was growing resentment with our gambling on the moderate Shiites in Iraq,” he said. “We cannot reverse the Shiite gain in Iraq, but we can contain it.”
“It seems there has been a debate inside the government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written widely on Shiites, Iran, and Iraq, told me. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.
”Martin Indyk, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration who also served as Ambassador to Israel, said that “the Middle East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War.” Indyk, who is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, added that, in his opinion, it was not clear whether the White House was fully aware of the strategic implications of its new policy. “The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq,” he said. “It’s doubling the bet across the region. This could get very complicated. Everything is upside down.”
The Administration’s new policy for containing Iran seems to complicate its strategy for winning the war in Iraq. Patrick Clawson, an expert on Iran and the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued, however, that closer ties between the United States and moderate or even radical Sunnis could put “fear” into the government of Prime Minister Maliki and “make him worry that the Sunnis could actually win” the civil war there. Clawson said that this might give Maliki an incentive to coöperate with the United States in suppressing radical Shiite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all
Dubya, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld - drooling idiots for ever even imagining that Islam could ever be compatible with democracy. Absolute barking-mad idiots, all of them.
Should have left after getting Saddam. Actually should have taken care of Afghanistan first one thing as a time.
Barf alert needs an added nausea alert and projectile vomiting caution ... the criminal regime in power now is writing the History the way it fits their feckless failure being shifted to ‘It’s Bush’s fault’. These criminal bastards always cause more death and mayhem than anything else spewing out of America under their control. The Russian leadership must be literally rolling in the aisle laughing so hard at our foolishness. America is no longer a Republic of we the people, and the foolish people are unable to see that truth as it stomps them down and destroys the lives of hundreds of millions world-wide in their name.