George HW Bush in 1991.
Elect a communist, get a disaster.
The Iraqi's.
A. Obama
B. Obama
C. Obama
D. All of the above
Iraq was never held.
Even while the US had troops stationed there hard line Islamists were allowed to execute Iraqis who left Islam under Sharia Law.
This guaranteed that there would not be a counter balancing force large enough to prevent the jihadists from taking control when the western military withdrew.
You had to be pretty damned stupid to expect any other result.
So the correct answer is that no one “Lost Iraq” because we never tried to hold it.
We did.
Just like we lost Viet Nam. Our military won the war and our domestic leaders turned the victory into a defeat out of pure spite.
If it's any comfort, people have been fighting over what we call Iraq for five thousand years. Everyone who ever thought he'd won it, lost it in the end.
The Democrat Party nominated and elected Obama. He was never capable of being successful in this job.
The fault lies with the Democrat Party.
Obama.
Despite the mistakes that were made in Iraq, it was still a viable country until Barack Obama made the headstrong decision to pull out all the troops, ignoring his own military advisers, just so he could claim to have restored "peace," when in fact he invited chaos and defeat.
Well, if pulling out the troops was the act which lost Iraq, he's blaming the wrong president. It was Bush who signed an agreement with Iraq in December 2008 - The U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement - which committed the U.S. to withdraw troops by 12/31/2011.
We did not start the Iraq war. Saddam did in 1991 with his invasion of Kuwait. The invasion of 2003 was a continuation of that same war brought about by the refusal of Saddam to adhere to UN resolutions agreed to by him at the time of the “truce”. The only thing debatable is whether or not The US should have been enforcing UN resolutions.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it’s easy to argue that Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a big mistake in the sense that Saddam kept a lid on the radical riff raff throughout the region. But we’d need a parallel universe to know what would have happened if we had left Saddam alone.
I don’t remember Bush claiming that Saddam had anything to do with 911. The WMD issue was just one point in the list of reasons, not the MAIN reason we invaded. I think that and “BUSH LIED” is all Mother Jones leftist horse s..t.
The real mistake Bush made was volunteering the US Military to enforce the dozen or so continuing resolutions of the world’s most worthless body...The United Nations...against Iraq.
Here’s an outside the box answer:
Iraqis.
Let’s add that we bombed the carp out of Germany and Japan. The citizenry paid a heavy price for their adventurous leadership. They had little taste for a repeat.
But today’s precision strike tech, coupled with an abject fear of collateral damage, leaves the civilian population comparatively unscathed. There is no lesson learned.
