Is the violence in Iraq Obama's fault?

CBS News ^ | June 13, 2014 | Rebecca Kaplan

[Rennes Templar]

The end of the Iraq war in 2011 was a high point of President Obama's first term, marking the completion of one of his most important campaign promises. But as Islamic militants capture cities and towns throughout Iraq and march toward the capital, Baghdad, the president once again faces the criticism that his foreign policy has failed.

The violence has swept Iraq just two and a half years after the last U.S. troops departed following a nearly nine-year war. The gains made during the war have been wiped out with the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The group's advance raises questions that will likely dog the president during the remainder of his time in office, from whether U.S. forces should have stayed behind, to how he might have tried to alter the course of events in recent years, to whether a similar policy in Afghanistan is doomed for failure.

Experts almost entirely agree that Mr. Obama could have done things differently, but differ on the question of how much blame he bears for the situation, when he might have changed course, and even whether it would have substantially changed the situation.

[canuck_conservative]

Was it Bush’s fault for getting us there in the first place?

So then Vietnam was all John Kennedy's fault?

[Romulus]

Give it up. There were no WMDs. Iraq was a railroad job engineered by Cheney, Rumsfeld, & Co. The power vacuum we created in 2003 has been filled by violent islamists — as I predicted at the time. Obama’s failure is in doing nothing to redeem the situation and in positively supporting the islamists in Syria and elsewhere. Obama took a bad situation and made it worse. But Bush destabilized the region, to his everlasting infamy. Second worst president ever.

[blueunicorn6]

Obama has had, what, 172 golf days since he took office?

Iraq is falling apart, and Obama is so concerned that he goes to a high school graduation and tells everyone how bad the Republicans are.

Golf and gab......that’s what you get from Obama.

[yldstrk]

saddam destabilized the region with his endless war with Iran and his invasion of Kuwait, and yes, Saddam moved his weapons of mass destruction to Syria and no, I won’t “give it up”

[ConservativeMan55]

I’m siding with you on this one.

It has been reported and revealed MANY times that those WMD’s were moved to Syria.

The MSM refused to touch it.

[ConservativeMan55]

Link 1

Link 2

[Cheerio]

Is the violence in Iraq Obama's fault?

NOTHING is ever this clown's fault, he just learned about this in the newspapers, but I am sure that he is right on top of it.

Obama: I will not rest

Nobody is more anything than President Obama

[rockrr]

Of course it is.

Many of us pointed out then the inevitability of what would come next after his capitulation. To monsters like Øbozo it’s a game but normal people recognize that lives are at stake.

My only regret is that the stench of corruption and failure won’t stick to him like a swim on a cesspool. He should be forced to carry it with him the rest of his miserable existence.

[austinaero]

Will Obama repeat this mess in Afghanistan?

Yes

[yldstrk]

yep yep

Libs love to say otherwise, but there were photos of the convoy too

[ConservativeMan55]

Yep I remember seeing photos of the Convoy.

[rockrr]

Do you suppose that it was Mono-sodium Glutamate that hussein used on his own people?

[lacrew]

Things have to be viewed from the time Barry took office.

It doesn’t matter who got us into Iraq or why. Barry’s decisions should be evaluated based on the situation in front of him, on Jan 20, 2009....which was a fairly stable Iraq, with an army being trained, elections being held, etc.

Now, as a result of Barry’s decision to sprint out of there, the streets are lined with beheaded Iraqi soldiers, and in the span of a week Iraq is being converted into the world’s largest and most well financed terrorist state in the history of human kind.

This is Barry’s fault.

There’s also another litmus test. Are the airwaves filled with media talking heads covering the disaster in Iraq? Not really. That means that the media intuitively knows it can’t be blamed on Bush.

[ConservativeMan55]

The earliest account of Hussein having hidden his WMDs in Syria came in January of 2004. Nizar Nayouf, an award-winning Syrian journalist who was granted political asylum in France,

said in a letter to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf not only that he knew Iraq’s WMDs were being hidden inside Syria, but that he could pinpoint precisely where they were being kept.

According to Nayouf’s witness, described as a senior source inside Syrian military intelligence he had known for two years, Iraq’s WMDs were in tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria, in the village of Tal Snan, north of the town of Salamija, and in the city of Sjinsjar on the Syrian border with the Lebanon, south of the city of Homs.

Nayouf claimed that the transfer of Iraqi WMDs to Syria was organized by the commanders of Hussein’s Iraqi Republican Guard with the help of General Dhu al-Himma Shalish and Assef Shawkat, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and brother-in-law, respectively.

We know for a fact that Shalish had a working relationship with Hussein long before the war in Iraq. The Syrian government awarded Shalish and his company, SES International Corporation, exclusive rights on contracts to supply the Iraqi market with goods from construction materials to detergent. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),

Shalish and SES helped the former Ba’athist regime access weapons systems by issuing false end-user certificates to foreign suppliers that listed Syria as the final country of destination. SES International then transshipped the goods to Iraq, and Shalish was subsequently sanctioned by the U.S. for procuring defense-related goods for Hussein in violation of sanctions against Iraq.

When two sources from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) — a 1,400-member team organized by the Pentagon and CIA — spoke with the Washington Times in August 2004, they reported that Hussein periodically removed guards on the Syrian border and replaced them with his own intelligence agents who supervised the movement of banned materials between the two countries. The shift was followed by the movement of trucks in and out of Syria suspected of carrying materials banned by UN sanctions. Once the shipments were made, the agents would leave and the regular border guards would resume their posts.

A similar claim was made by Lieutenant General Moshe Ya’alon in December of 2005, a former Israeli military officer who served as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces from July 2002 to June 2005. “(Hussein) transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria” six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom started, according to Ya’alon. “No one went to Syria to find it.”

Just a month later in January 2006, the Iraqi general who served as the No. 2 official in Hussein’s air force, Georges Sada, claimed Iraq moved WMDs into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into two civilian aircrafts in which the passenger seats were removed, as well as in multiple ground convoys of trucks.

“There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,” Sada stated. “I am confident they were taken over [to Syria].”

Sada said he even knew the two pilots who transported the material: “I know them very well. They are very good friends of mine.” He claimed that the pilots told him Special Republican Guard brigades loaded materials onto the planes, including “yellow barrels with skull and crossbones on each barrel.” The flights, 56 in total, attracted little notice because they were thought to be civilian flights providing relief from Iraq to Syria, which had suffered a flood after a dam collapse in June of 2002.

“Saddam realized, this time, the Americans are coming,” Sada said. “They handed over the weapons of mass destruction to the Syrians.” He claimed that the Iraqi official responsible for transferring the weapons was a cousin of Hussein named Ali Hussein al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali.”

One month after that in February of 2006, Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a former Iraqi general and “personal friend” of Hussein’s who defected shortly before the Gulf War of 1991, also claimed as much in an interview: “I know Saddam’s weapons are in Syria due to certain military deals that were made going as far back as the late 1980s that dealt with the event that either capitals were threatened with being overrun by an enemy nation.

“At this point Saddam knew that the United States were eventually going to come for his weapons and the United States wasn’t going to just let this go like they did in the original Gulf War,” al-Tikriti said. “He knew that he had lied for this many years and wanted to maintain legitimacy with the pan-Arab nationalists. He also has wanted since he took power to embarrass the West and this was the perfect opportunity to do so. After Saddam denied he had such weapons why would he use them or leave them readily available to be found?”

Finally, current Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, who formerly headed the U.S. agency that processes and analyzes satellite imagery (the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency), claimed in an interview with the New York Times in October of 2003 that “satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the American invasion in March” led him to believe that illegal weapons material had “unquestionably” been moved out of Iraq.

“I think personally that those below the senior leadership saw what was coming, and I think they went to some extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence,” said Clapper. “I’ll call it an ‘educated hunch.’ Based on what we saw prior to the onset of hostilities, we certainly felt there were indications of WMD activity. … There is no question that there was a lot of traffic, increase in traffic up to the immediate onset of combat and certainly during Iraqi Freedom.”

It’s not like Hussein didn’t have any time to carry out such a large transfer. To the contrary, the Bush administration had been trying to make a case for military intervention in Iraq almost a year before the invasion finally occurred in March 2003.

Truthfully, we’ll probably never know where these chemical weapons now being used in the Syrian civil war originated from. I also concede that all we have to go on are second-hand eye witness accounts and sources as well as a lot of hearsay and conjecture for which no amount of intelligence gathering from 10 years ago can now prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. Still, I thought it was worth re-exploring. And I’d very much still like to know indeed where these weapons came from.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/62103/how-did-syria-get-chemical-weapons-did-they-come-from-our-old-friend-saddam

[Unam Sanctam]

I believe he is responsible. If he had tried to work out a sensible status of forces agreement to maintain long term the gains that had been made (whether or not he supported the war in the first place), things would likely have been different, IMHO.

[kevkrom]

No, it’s not his fault. The fault is on those who perpetrate the violence.

But he made the decisions that paved the way for it to happen, and has done nothing to try to stop it. So he bears full responsibility, especially because such an outcome was so easily predicted and concerns over it were repeatedly dismissed.

[ConservativeMan55]

Uhm.. not only has he done nothing to stop it. He has helped perpetuate it!

He A) choreographed when we would leave Iraq and basically told the enemy he would do nothing to stop their advance.

B)He Provided them with WEAPONS to take over the country!

Taxpayer funded weapons.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Obama’s foreign policy is by Magic 8 Ball. I take that back, if his foreign policy was purely by chance, he would do what is right for the US once in a while.

[wtd]

Obama and progressives in general lack the 'shame' gene.

However,recalling essays posted in the past by Hugh Fitzgerald at JihadWatch.org (now at NewEnghlishReview), one begins to wonder if Obama is inadvertently revealing the true nature of Islam through his policy. The tribal nature of the Middle East defies Western logic/policy.

Why express “worry” about sectarian violence between different sects of mujahedin, who otherwise would be devoting their energies to our destruction? Evacuate the Christian minority and leave Islam to do what Islam does to themselves.

As for the Kurds, they will never be Arab. Islam is an Arab supremacy ideology, hence the eternal conflict between shia & sunni . . . any future for Kurds depends on expendable energy the Shia or Sunni has for addressing Kurds - eternally. It's the nature of the beast.

Islam is a self inflicted wound. The sooner the West realizes survival depends on excising Islam, the safer the world will be.

[Graewoulf]

What does it take for Boehner to begin Articles of Impeachment for the Democrat’s Obama?