Posted on 08/12/2014 3:37:47 AM PDT by markomalley
There was a time not so long ago when President Barack Obama boasted of how he had “ended” the Iraq War. It was, in his telling, a sign of his stalwart fidelity to his word.
A video produced by his 2012 presidential campaign was titled “Ending the War in Iraq: A Promise Kept.” In December 2011 his website said: “This month, President Obama is making good on his promise to bring the last American troops home from Iraq in time for the holidays.” The president portrayed the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops as testimony to his exemplary political character. “You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” he told crowds during his reelection campaign. “I said I’d end the war in Iraq. I ended it.”
That’s as definitive a statement of responsibility as you get. But now that the president has “restarted” the war in Iraq — with limited air strikes against the terrorist group ISIS, which has thrived in the vacuum created, in part, by our total exit — he is not in such a buoyantly boastful mood.
At a press availability over the weekend about his new bombing campaign, the president kvetched about all those people who keep insisting that he ended the Iraq War: “What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision.”
It is true that the Bush administration had agreed to end our troop presence, and if we were going to stay, Obama had to negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqis. Why it didn’t happen is a complicated question, and Iraqi resistance is part of the answer. But Obama was perfectly content with the outcome.
“The leaders of all the major Iraqi parties had privately told American commanders that they wanted several thousand military personnel to remain, to train Iraqi forces and to help track down insurgents,” according to a definitive account in The New Yorker by Dexter Filkins. Obama was “ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq,” Filkins writes. American officials negotiating with the Iraqis were left without guidance from the White House for months, and when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki offered to sign an executive agreement — bypassing the problematic Iraqi parliament — the administration said “no.”
Filkins quotes an Iraqi politician: “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible.” And why not? This was the fulfillment of Obama’s defining political promise. When we were out of Iraq entirely, he didn’t say how regrettable it was; he declared “mission accomplished.”
It’s only after the ensuing disaster that we learn he was an innocent bystander. It may be that Iraq — after being largely pacified by 2009 — would have fallen apart even if we had maintained a residual force. But troops on the ground gave us the influence to restrain Maliki from his worst instincts.
Without the U.S. as an honest broker, it has been downhill ever since. Lieutenant General Michael Barbero, the former deputy commander in Iraq, told Filkins, “Everything that has happened there was not just predictable — we predicted it.”
Iraq is perhaps the purest expression of the Obama doctrine. We removed ourselves entirely from the country on the assumption that we could diminish our influence without baleful consequence and that there were effective substitutes for military power. Now that the most powerful terrorist group of modern times controls large parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria, we are back at war, although without the requisite seriousness or comprehensive strategy.
What is happening in Iraq is exactly what we fought to prevent with the surge in 2007 and 2008. It is heartbreaking commentary on President Obama’s recklessness that we are now in an arguably worse position, with fewer options to reverse it. He never ended the Iraq War, as he so proudly said. He only abandoned it.
1. For one thing, there's no reason to criticize the Obama administration for "ending the war" when it has become painfully obvious now that the U.S. never should have invaded Iraq in the first place. The sad truth is that Iraq is a disaster today because Saddam Hussein was far more effective at dealing with radical Islamic extremists than that dope George W. Bush ever was.
2. The history of the U.S. role in Iraq just goes to show that nations like the U.S. with democratically elected governments are ill-equipped to wage colonial wars like this. Elected leaders change, and an affluent nation with the highest standard of living in the history of mankind doesn't have the attention span or the moral compass to support -- or even justify -- a long-term occupation halfway around the world.
There’s a video out there of Obama speaking - stating that when someone is elected President - they are owned by the American people - that there’s not time for rest, vacations, ect...
He is the biggest hypocrite ever in existence...then again, those of us that didn’t vote for knew that - but I hate that we were proven right by an 8 yr fact!
Bush had excellent reasons for invading Iraq, which he stated at length.
He created a democracy in the Middle East. Not a shining democracy, but Iraq became a country where the people could self-determine and not be casually brutalized by Saddam’s gangsters. When Bush left office Iraq was the least worst country in the region (except for Israel of course).
The subsequent abandonment of Iraq is NOT a natural result of a rich country getting bored: it is the result of vile left-wing treachery. Just like Vietnam.
The fact that the American Left has a habit of betraying America’s allies is not something to reproach Bush with. The squalid know-nothings who voted for Obama - twice! - bear the shame for Iraq.
The post-invasion Iraq officially became a farce when the U.S. leadership allowed the new Iraqi government to adopt a constitution in which Islam is enshrined as the official state religion. That pretty much guaranteed two things: (1) Iraq would remain culturally dysfunctional in perpetuity, and (2) Iraq would be an unstable mess due to the competing interests of various Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims.
The problem here isn't that the Bush administration did something wrong. The problem is that the Bush administration fouled this up even though anyone who looked at the situation objectively and wasn't viewing it with a political agenda in mind was predicting exactly what we're seeing now. As I've said many time here on FreeRepublic, Iraq is a disaster today because Saddam Hussein was far more effective at quelling civil unrest and radical Islamic extremism than anyone in Washington.
But even with that monumental failing - which I regard as a failure of civilisational confidence by the Bush administration - the people of Iraq still gained a voice in the process of government for the first time ever. Also: Iraq became a country which wasn't trying actively to destroy its neighbors.
Iraq didn't become a model democracy. It became a democracy. It became the least-worst state in a region filled with tyranny and theocratic crazies.
Iraq is a disaster today because Obama heavily funded extreme Jihadists in Syria while simultaneously abandoning Iraq. It doesn't even look like a mistake on his part: rather it looks like a deliberate act of establishing a head-chopping caliphate.
But yes I'm pretty sure that - while Saddam actively supported exactly the same flavor of Jihadists - he wouldn't have encouraged them to invade his own country. That's the exciting innovation that Obama brought to the Middle East.
bump
In fact, when you go back to the early 2000s and see the workings of the "neo-conservatives" in the Bush administration and their minions in Iraq like Ahmed Chalabi in this context, there is stronger and stronger evidence that the foreign policy of the United States of America over the last couple of decades has been dictated by agents of Iran operating in the highest levels of the U.S. government.
BTW - love your Slim Picken's tagline, I read it and can still hear his sweet drawl....
It sounds like you would prefer the U.S. follow in Saddam’s footsteps and use his tactics to quell the unrest. "Kill them all"........
Actually, the “unrest” isn’t our problem. Or, more accurately ... it’s only our problem because we overthrew the dude who kept the place quiet in the first place.
LOL. That movie is filled with classic quotes, ain’t it?
Don't forget the Green Revolution in 2009. The long-accepted totalitarian state in Iran had been destabilized by the presence of a functional, stable democracy in Iraq.
Iran might have been a democracy today. It might have been the second domino to fall. The Middle East might have become a sea of self-determining peoples.
But then what happened? The revolutionaries in Iran cried out to Obama for help and he sided with the forces of Islamic tyranny. The Besijji gained the ascendancy. The revolutionaries ended up dead, or raped and dead.
Iraq isn't the first country, the first people that Obama has shamefully betrayed. He betrayed the people of Iran long before he seized the opportunity to betray Iraq.
Put the blame where it actually lies. The Bush doctrine of Freedom could have changed the Middle East.
Would have changed it - except that Obama and the Left did what they do best. They committed every treachery they they could in order to pull down the achievements of the Right. They made America a harmless enemy and a treacherous ally.
What is more: they may have succeeded in attainting the very notion of democracy throughout the Middle East.
My lunch break is over: thank you for the stimulating conversation.
Thanks. I’ll reply later today when I get home from work. Gotta hit the road now. :-)
1. Saddam Hussein was more effective with the radicals because he trained most of them, paid suicide bomber bonuses, and bought them equipment. Most of the training was done at Salman Pak. They weren't going to hurt him because he gave them what they wanted.
2. Yes, we failed so badly in Germany, Japan, Philippines with that whole long-term occupation thing. Our problem is electing people who are willing to abandon other people. Character does count and anybody willing to kill a baby in a womb is willing to run from supporting Democracy in another country. Bush had purple fingers and girls in schools, Obama has Christian and children's heads on pikes. And everybody told him it would happen.
“Iraq isn’t the first country, the first people that Obama has shamefully betrayed. He betrayed the people of Iran long before he seized the opportunity to betray Iraq.”
That almost everyone has seemingly forgotten this very prescient fact is a sad statement in and of itself, it is an indictment of our ability to quickly forget and to rationalize anything away.
The Middle East is filled with Islamic countries where a ruthless and brutal leadership is a necessary ingredient for stability. Promoting “democracy” in places like Iraq is like teaching molecular physics to preschoolers.
That is why you need a stable ground force that stays the course, and the children growing up see the difference in the previous governance and the benefits of the changes. We had to do that in Germany, Japan and to some degree, the Philippines to get more stable leadership into those countries.
There were huge problems in both Germany and the Philippines with U.S. troops and elements which still wanted to fight.
Only Japan was truly unconditional in its surrender.
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