Our Foreign Policy Problems Go Well Beyond Iraq

Indeed, on this point pretty much everyone agrees. Jeb Bush, the brother of the president who launched the war, has said so. So has Hillary Clinton, the only presidential candidate in either party to have actually voted to invade Iraq (though she refused to admit her vote was a mistake until fairly recently).

The only disagreements on the Republican side are about the degree and nature of the mistake. Catch Donald Trump in a glandular moment and he'll say that George W. Bush knowingly sent thousands of Americans to their deaths based on a lie. Ask Trump when he's in a more mature mood -- or when he gets bad press for his slanders -- and he'll say he doesn't know whether it was a lie.

The other GOP candidates agree that it was a mistake in hindsight, though most say, rightly, it was defensible at the time. Indeed, some of us believe that we could have turned a mistake into a success had Barack Obama not been in such a hurry to squander the hard-won victories of President Bush's surge.

On the Democratic side, there's a lot less nuance. Sen. Bernie Sanders insists that Clinton's vote for the war is all you need to know about her foreign policy judgment. Clinton's reply is, "One vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat ISIS."

Clinton is right, of course. But at this point, plans are less important than the will to put them into action. I suspect there's no shortage of plans to get the job done sitting in Obama's inbox. What's missing is a presidential commitment to implementing them.

But ISIS is just one of our problems. Obama's own director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that we now face "the most diverse array of challenges and threats that I can recall."

By no means is it all Obama's fault. Saudi Arabia's problems, for instance, are a poisonous mix of religious extremism and medieval political arrangements temporarily sustained by an ultimately unsustainable economic model. Similarly, Vladimir Putin has had his eyes on restoring the grandeur of imperial Russia for decades. China's burgeoning nationalism has been baked into the political and demographic cake for even longer.

But these and other challenges have all been made worse on Obama's watch. Russia seized Crimea and declared an unofficial war on Ukraine. China has only grown emboldened in the face of American lassitude. Just this week, China deployed new missile systems to one of its manmade islands in a disputed region of the South China Sea while Obama was holding his South Asia summit in California. The insult was not subtle.

Obama's Iran deal, crafted unilaterally as an end-run around Congress, has started a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race and caused our longstanding allies in the region to question our reliability. To date, there's no evidence that Iran has abandoned its role as a terrorism sponsor, its quest for nuclear weapons or its goal of becoming a regional hegemon.

Before that, Obama's decision to renege on our missile defense commitments to our Eastern European allies sent a similar signal to friends and foes alike.

We can debate how much blame Obama deserves for Syria's civil war, but almost no one outside his paid staff disputes that he's only made things worse. The conflict there has set off the worst humanitarian crisis in Europe since the end of World War II -- that's John Kerry's own assessment -- which may yet tear the European Union asunder.

The instability closer to the fighting is even more dangerous. Russia and Turkey may soon go to war with each other, as Russia mercilessly and indiscriminately massacres anyone standing in the way of its pet, Syrian President Bashar Assad. The Jordanian monarchy may crumble, in part for a lack of assistance from the United States.

And yet, the gravity of the situation has yet to enter into the presidential contest in a serious way. As a co-author of Obama's disastrous foreign policy, Hillary Clinton has no interest in calling attention to the global catastrophes unfolding around us. Bernie Sanders doesn't want to talk about anything he can't blame on billionaires, and Donald Trump doesn't want to talk about anything other than his poll numbers, his insults and the fraudulent claim that he predicted all of this before Bush launched the war in Iraq.

We get it already. The Iraq war was a mistake.

No, Obama withdrawing in 2010 with the job 98% complete was the mistake. If we had stayed and finished the job, ISIS would of been exterminated in 2010-2011

As Islamic State of Iraq, 2006â€“13
Main article: Islamic State of Iraq
US Marines in Ramadi, May 2006. The Islamic State of Iraq had declared the city to be its capital.

According to a study compiled by United States intelligence agencies in early 2007, the ISIâ€”also known as AQIâ€”planned to seize power in the central and western areas of Iraq and turn it into a Sunni caliphate.[93] The group built in strength and at its height enjoyed a significant presence in the Iraqi governorates of Al Anbar, Diyala and Baghdad, claiming Baqubah as a capital city.[94][95][96][97]

The Iraq War troop surge of 2007 supplied the United States military with more manpower for operations targeting the group, resulting in dozens of high-level AQI members being captured or killed.[98]

Between July and October 2007, al-Qaeda in Iraq was reported to have lost its secure military bases in Al Anbar province and the Baghdad area.[99] During 2008, a series of US and Iraqi offensives managed to drive out AQI-aligned insurgents from their former safe havens, such as the Diyala and Al Anbar governorates, to the area of the northern city of Mosul.[100]

By 2008, the ISI was describing itself as being in a state of “extraordinary crisis”.[101] Its violent attempts to govern its territory led to a backlash from Sunni Arab Iraqis and other insurgent groups and a temporary decline in the group, which was attributable to a number of factors,[102] notably the Anbar Awakening.

In late 2009, the commander of US forces in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, stated that the ISI “has transformed significantly in the last two years. What once was dominated by foreign individuals has now become more and more dominated by Iraqi citizens”.[103] On 18 April 2010, the ISI’s two top leaders, Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, were killed in a joint US-Iraqi raid near Tikrit.[104] In a press conference in June 2010, General Odierno reported that 80% of the ISI’s top 42 leaders, including recruiters and financiers, had been killed or captured, with only eight remaining at large. He said that they had been cut off from al-Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.[105][106][107]

On 16 May 2010, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was appointed the new leader of the Islamic State of Iraq.[108][109] Al-Baghdadi replenished the group's leadership, many of whom had been killed or captured, by appointing former Ba’athist military and intelligence officers who had served during Saddam Hussein's rule.[110] These men, nearly all of whom had spent time imprisoned by the US military, came to make up about one third of Baghdadi’s top 25 commanders. One of them was a former colonel, Samir al-Khlifawi, also known as Haji Bakr, who became the overall military commander in charge of overseeing the group's operations.[111][112] Al-Khlifawi was instrumental in doing the ground work that led to the growth of ISIL.[113]

In July 2012, al-Baghdadi released an audio statement online announcing that the group was returning to former strongholds from which US troops and the Sons of Iraq had driven them in 2007 and 2008.[114] He also declared the start of a new offensive in Iraq called Breaking the Walls, aimed at freeing members of the group held in Iraqi prisons.[114] Violence in Iraq had begun to escalate in June 2012, primarily with AQI’s car bomb attacks, and by July 2013, monthly fatalities exceeded 1,000 for the first time since April 2008.[115]

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