Posted on 08/16/2014 6:53:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
"I think this is going to take some time," our president warned last Saturday as he took off for a vacation on Martha's Vineyard, maybe because he felt he had to offer some explanation as Iraq collapsed along with his foreign policy in general. What was once Iraq is now divided, like ancient Gaul, into three parts -- Shi'a, Sunni and Kurdish -- all of which are themselves crumbling. So now Barack Obama tells us that it may take some time to put Iraq together again after it fell apart in record time once he withdrew American forces there in such haste. And according to a purely arbitrary timetable he considerately announced well in advance, lest the enemy be surprised.
The war this president claimed to have ended there three years ago is back -- if it ever went away. But to this president, history is one of the plastic arts. He can reshape it any time. And often does. Now he tells us it'll take a while to end the war there. You think? The way it always takes more time to rebuild something than to destroy it? The bloody consequences of his own decision to withdraw from Iraq prematurely continue to haunt him, which may be why he's still trying to rationalize it. Even as, little by little, he's being forced to reverse it.
After all the blood and treasure America sacrificed to hold Iraq together, this president and both his secretaries of state (Hillary Clinton and then John Kerry) have managed to squander the hard-won gains achieved there in no time at all. Now there's change you can really believe in.
Only now does this president tell us, oh, yes, and by the way, it's going to take some time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And only now is Hillary Clinton, having retired from her high post in this administration, confiding that she had doubts about this president's foreign policy all along. For only now is she preparing to run for the presidency herself, and realizing that she has some explaining to do.
What a show. It would be amusing if it weren't so tragic, for the numberless victims of this administration's blundering ways are all too real, their suffering all too palpable.
But don't fret. A few bombs dropped here and there should get the job done. Just how effectively was summed up by this lede on a front-page story in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal: "WASHINGTON -- After four days of pounding targets in northern Iraq, U.S. officials warned Monday that the campaign was unlikely to inflict serious damage to the militant group now controlling large parts of Iraq and Syria."
My, what a surprise. After lavishing neglect on this growing threat for years, the president admits it might take some time to save whatever can be saved of what was once Iraq. That is, if he's really interested in saving it, rather than just going through the motions.
These thousands of new refugees, tens of thousands of them, are sure to be followed by hundreds of thousands fated to share their ordeal as Iraq turns into the latest Syria, where the bloody results of this administration's negligence have been all too clear all too long. For years.
Unless Washington can somehow get a grip on what's happening in that part of the world and reverse its disastrous course, these latest victims in Iraq will surely not be the last. For their country has been left prey to the tender mercies of still another horde of fanatics who have materialized out of the desert wastes and started advancing in all directions.
An air drop or two may not make much of a difference at this point. Or even the dispatch of a few hundred Special Forces to get a fraction of these refugees off the barren mountaintop where they'd been left to swelter and suffer. America, once the hope of the world, now does little but watch as this tragedy unfolds.
Yes, this sudden show of force is better than nothing, but just barely. As the whole world surely recognizes, whether friend or ever advancing foe. By now even the British and Italians and French -- the French! -- have urged that something be done to stop this Islamist version of the Khmer Rouge from wiping out still more innocents.
By now even Hillary Clinton -- Hillary Rodham Clinton! -- is saying it was a mistake not to have done something earlier to stop the never-ending carnage in Syria, which is what gave rise to this ever-advancing army of Islamist crazies.
Only now does Mrs. Clinton tell us she had misgivings when she was actually in a position to do something about them. Back in 2006, she had dismissed the Surge that turned Iraq around and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Back then she was telling us it would take "a willing suspension of disbelief" to believe this Surge would work. But work it did. Even though she and another senator at the time -- Barack Obama of Illinois -- said it never would.
Only now, after this president's policy in Iraq has proven so costly a failure, does she tell us she was against it all the time she served as secretary of state. If so, why didn't she say so or, even better, do something honorable -- like resign her high office in protest? But the time when a secretary of state would resign over a matter of principle seems to have passed with Cyrus Vance, who parted ways with the Carter administration when it adopted a policy he disagreed with.
It's so much more prudent for an ambitious politician to wait until a president's policy becomes a clear failure before criticizing it. Only now, as she herself prepares for a presidential run, has Mrs. Clinton decided to distance herself from her former boss.
Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. And when a great power decides to abdicate and leave history's stage to whoever will seize power for whatever low purpose, what else did our president think would happen -- that peace would suddenly break out? The man seems oblivious to reality, and what it should have taught all of us: Whenever America retreats, evil advances.
Thanks to the incompetence of Dear Leader, Joe Biden is now a Prophet.
Yes as much as it pains me to say it and my Mom said it yesterday we probably would have been better off if we had followed Joe’s idea of a loose coalition of 3 states.
To be fair to Barack Obama which also pains me no end Malaki kicked us out so he and his Iranian buddies could start dismantling the Consensus govt. Not that Barry complained about it or anything.
Obama is just punishment for electing him TWICE...
We could have twisted Malikis arm when we had leverage there.
But Dear Leader was eager to bug out and take a victory lap.
So he destroyed years of Blood, Sweat, Tears and Treasure.
"I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation building." -- George W. Bush, Republican Party candidate for President of the United States (10/11/2000)
Much as I hate to defend Barack Obama, the responsibility for this debacle in Iraq should be placed right where it belongs: with the delusional hacks from the prior administration who actually thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq in the first place.
You said it. His ‘You can not learn the presidency’ comes to mind
blood of America's finest defenders (R.I.P.) and treasure of America's finest workers (R.I.P.)
Death & plunder…it's what totalitarians do. Witness current events, foreign and domestic.
First you write:
I stand with George W. Bush on this one.
"I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation building." -- George W. Bush, Republican Party candidate for President of the United States (10/11/2000)
Than you continue with:
Much as I hate to defend Barack Obama, the responsibility for this debacle in Iraq should be placed right where it belongs: with the delusional hacks from the prior administration who actually thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq in the first place.
*bump*
Sure could have but Barry saw an easy out and ran for the exits. Now its an out of control mess.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not a continuation of Desert Storm. In fact, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney explicitly said in 1994 -- in an interview in which he was asked why the U.S. didn't "finish the job" in Desert Storm -- that invading and occupying Iraq would be a bad idea. It's too bad Vice President Dick Cheney didn't heed his own advice nearly a decade later.
"Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey." -- Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney (4/15/94)
Why would you blame the Obama administration for the disaster in Iraq in 2014 when the situation was set in motion by his predecessor in 2003 and is following the exact script Dick Cheney described in 1994?
effect=effed
5.56mm
Iraq was cobbled together out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire and is nothing more that a fictional "country" defined by lines on a map crossing ethnic and tribal boundaries. You find the same story in Third World toilets all over the world.
Iraq is turning into what it was always destined to be. The U.S. didn't need to piss away thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars to make it happen.
Going into Iraq was the right thing to do. We saw evidence that Al Qaeda had training camps there; we knew Saddam Hussein was a murderous tyrant (think Kurd Genocide) and the Iraqi Government had tried to put in motion plans to assassinate GHWBush. Oh, and the weapons of mass destruction......didn’t they surface in Syria when the ‘red line’ was crossed? Under GWB, we had WON that war and were successfully stabilizing that country. Obama wanted ALL troops out so he could have his ‘talking point’ running up to the 2012 election. He had promised ALL troops out of Iraq....and he did it. He didn’t want any status of forces agreement. I am in shock that he now says he is surprised that people think he made the decision to pull ALL troops out. The more he talks, the more even his own people must realize he is a pathological liar. We WON the war, Obama THREW AWAY the peace.
If Obama removed those troops in 2011 to give himself a "talking point" for his 2012 campaign, then wouldn't you have to acknowledge that George W. Bush was a complicit player (four years before the fact) in Obama's 2012 re-election campaign?
“Why would you blame the Obama administration for the disaster in Iraq in 2014...”
Because the Big O is the President and it’s his responsibility, that’s why. Never before has a sitting President of the United States blamed his predecessor for his own failings. Anyone on this forum who goes along with this kind of excuse making should be ashamed.
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