Replies

If the fall of Singapore to the Japanese metaphorically marked the eclipse of the British Empire in the eyes of colonials like Nehru, the fall of Falluja marks the eclipse of the Bush foreign policy and the final unarguable end of trading American lives, limbs and treasure for an illusion.

To place the blame on Obama would not be incorrect but it would be to do a great disservice to understanding America's dilemma and the state of the world. If Obama had not sold out the American adventure in Iraq, time would have accomplished the same. The fault is not just in Obama who is hostile to American interests around the world, the fault was in a misguided policy.

We are in a world war against militant Islam which uses terrorism and infiltration of the Arab world as well as the Christian world as primary weapons. Fighting a land war which unavoidably costs casualties to a society unwilling to see its own blood shed, is a policy which ultimately cannot prevail over time. Worse, invading Iraq has nothing to do with protecting the homeland from terrorists and had the unintended consequence of generating an Arab spring which is turned into an Arab nightmare.

The whole of American foreign policy has to be reconsidered and, after Obama, redirected.

We agree. Bush went in on the side od the saudis. alibama switched sides to iran. We should never have been there and just allowed them to continue killing each other. But before bush, there was bill and Kosovo. bush pushed for yet another islamic state born out of a false narrative of ‘ethnic cleansing’ which clinton perfected. It all ties in with whose shoes we were kissing, and now there is not anything we can do because we have allowed islam to expand and infiltrate literally every country on earth.

If Obama had not sold out the American adventure in Iraq, time would have accomplished the same.

I'm inclined to agree. I had hopes that the external enemy in Iran would help press the divergent elements in Iraq together, and for a time it actually did. Unfortunately no Iraqi George Washington ever appeared, and that sort of thing is a rarity in any case.

I have stated repeatedly that our involvement in Iraq bought time in the overall strategic battle against Islamic militancy, due to the attrition to the enemy command structure, lines of communication, and ability to recruit that took place between 2003 and 2007, perhaps an estimated 10-20 years before it would fully recover, or so I hoped. It has been seven, and Iraq is not yet lost, nor have al Qaeda and others yet fully recovered. That's the good news.

The bad is that I didn't anticipate a foreign policy package quite as disastrous as that of the 0bama administration. We didn't actually lose Iraq in country - recall that 0bama's reduction in combat forces there was actually six months behind Bush's optimistic projections. Where we lost Iraq (if we have yet) was in indecisive and counterproductive actions elsewhere: Libya, Egypt, Israel policy, Iranian nuclear negotiations, involvement in Syria; all of these served to revitalize al Qaeda's recruitment efforts. It revitalized the regional clout of Russia and Iran as well. In essence, 0bama's ideology, his inexperience, and his State Department squandered back the time that had been purchased in blood.

Nevertheless, I have hope that the momentum Islamic militancy has partially regained may be met with a firm stance in the future. But that is at least three years away, and it isn't looking particularly encouraging at the moment.

” Fighting a land war which unavoidably costs casualties to a society unwilling to see its own blood shed, is a policy which ultimately cannot prevail over time. Worse, invading Iraq has nothing to do with protecting the homeland from terrorists and had the unintended consequence of generating an Arab spring which is turned into an Arab nightmare.”

Agree with you on first statement (brilliant)
Disagree on the rest.

In 2002, Bush's taking the fight against terrorism to a 2 front war was not a flawed strategy.

The strategic question after attacking al Qaeda in Afghanistan was whether they would stay fight and die there, or flee and set up again somewhere else. It was correctly assessed that al Qaeda’s leadership would flee and find shelter under another regime- the most likely and deadly to our interests being Iraq and Saddam Hussein, whose flouting of Western sanctions had proven highly successful and emboldening to him. Petraeus pulled it out in Iraq, did a brilliant job after applying lessons learned and implementing a surge - and his success then so threatened the treacherous US democrat party that they, with our pwnded media, feverishly campaigned successfully to a war weary and information deprived US on Iraq's costs to end the war - and then when it was convenient, they also ended the career of Petraeus

It was obama’s treachery against his own country, his world apology tour to bash America to Egyptian students at al Azhar University n Egypt, his calls to and covert adminstration contacts with radical islamists and the muslim brotherhood to “community organize” against the pro-Western regimes in Egypt and even Libya (Qadaffi, while a wild card, had turned over his covert nuclear program to the West and begun seeking closer ties)...this is what led to the destructive “Arab spring”, a US betrayal of the very idealists and reformers obama claimed (lied about) to be trying to inspire. The world should have seen this when Obama ignored and thus condemned the attempted social uprising against extremists led by students and the middle class in Iran.