"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. -- Dick Cheney (April 15, 1994)
Wow, its getting to be like we are reading MSNBC talking points here.
Obama could have had a reasonable Status of Forces agreement. He didn’t want it and he let slow Joe sabotage the negotiations.
******But here’s an easy way for Democrats to avoid the debate entirely: Claim that President Obama had no choice about whether to keep troops in Iraq or not, and blame Bush. The inconvenient aspect of this argument is that it’s not true
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/380508/no-us-troops-didnt-have-leave-iraq-patrick-brennan
These claims don’t jibe with what we know about how the negotiations with Iraq went. It’s the White House itself that decided just 2–3,000 troops made sense, when the Defense Department and others were proposing more. Maliki was willing to accept a deal with U.S. forces if it was worth it to him — the problem was that the Obama administration wanted a small force so that it could say it had ended the war. Having a very small American force wasn’t worth the domestic political price Maliki would have to pay for supporting their presence. In other words, it’s not correct that “the al-Maliki government wanted American troops to leave.”
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/380508/no-us-troops-didnt-have-leave-iraq-patrick-brennan
The situation in Iraq has devolved into a disaster of epic proportions.
President George H.W. Bush made a huge mistake by allowing Iraq to invade Kuwaite .
He made an even bigger mistake by leaving Saddam in power after we went to war with Iraq and obliterated their military.
Bill Clinton's Iraq policy made the situation even worse.
Saddam was driving the Middle East to war when President Bush II was elected and Saddam was supporting the AQ Khan Pan Islamic nuclear weapons proliferation effort with funding from Oil for Food revenues and technical support from ex pat members of Iraq's nuclear program working in foreign Iraq funded sites in Syria and Libya to avoid sanctions
Bush II did all the right things and by the end of his Presidency, Iraq was on it's way to becoming a modern democratic state - in about a 40 years assuming an American supervised presence to stabilize the country in the interim.
George Bush did the impossible. He militarily defeated Iraq and then shut down most of the cycle of hatred and vendettas that destroys the Middle East and gave the Iraqi people hope for a better future.
Iraq could have been the new Germany, Japan or Korea.
Then came Barak Obama.
He has willfully removed all American troops who were stabilizing the country on one hand, and then manufactured chaos and strife in the Middle East. As part of his destabilization he trained and equipped the al Qaeda ISIS terror army that is taking over Iraq and then stood by and blocked any opposition while al Qaeda’s ISIS Army took over the region.
President Bush II failed to secure the future of Iraq to please his critics, which is a huge failure on his part but he left Obama with a stable Iraq which was on the path to a better future.
Obama has engineered and manufactured an American trained and armed Islamic terrorist driven meltdown of the entire Middle East and his removal of American troops from the region and Iraq has created a power vacuum that has enable 800 Syrian based members of al Qaeda’s ISIS army to take over and dominate the region.
Bush deserves harsh criticism for going into Iraq and ousting Saddam and then failing to provide long term agreements and long term American presence to secure the peace and the future of Iraq long term.
Obama is not just to blame for the current disaster in Iraq - he is directly responsible for meltdown he has engineered in the entire region.
Dick Cheney is totally full of sh*t. He and W are the ones that destabilized the middle east. They got the ball rolling. W put family business (take down Saddam) over the nations’ business. If it was not for O, W would be the worst president in the modern era. W was even worse then Jimmy!