Obama?
We didn’t stick with Maliki. We abanadoned Maliki which is why he took matters into his own hands.
Interesting read but this just proves that no matter how much $$$ and American lives we pour into these poor Islamic crap-holes we still cant control them.
Now in comparison China looks at the bottom $$$ line before moving in to other countries.
They are what libs wrongly called Republicans over the middle East, Business-men.
Washington Compost runs defense for Obama
How about training and arming the rebels in Syria? They foung out it was easier to invade Northern Iraq. You can add McCain to the idiot list.
We lost Iraq and Afghanistan because.........
WE ALLOWED THEMTO FORM NEW CONSTITUTIONS BASED ON ISLAM INSTEAD OF FREEDOM OF RELIGION/CONSCIENCE!
Nobody wants to talk about this FACT.
Of course we couldn’t do that, because it would have enraged the locals....WHO ARE THE ENEMIES OF FREEDOM....
The difference between a moderate Muslim and a radical Muslim is the radical wants to kill people who aren’t Muslim, and the moderate wants the radical to kill them too. This would blow the neocon belief that Islam is peace, and Ward Cleaver is living just beneath the grimy pajamas of your average inbred, pajama wearing goat raper.
Cultures are not equivalent and genetics play a big role in societal behavior.
Nobody wants to talk about this. Humans are animals. Take an untrained Labrador Retriever and an untrained Rhodesian Ridgeback on your next wild hog hunt should you have doubts. You’ll have a crappy hunt, but a few hours in, you’ll see.
I may be a racist, culturist, misogynistic, homonausiac but as sure as God has teeth I’m right!
This writer guy Ali Khedturd is like “I knew, I traveled, I know, I was, I helped, I organized, I accompanied, I lobbied....”
And then in 2010 “I urged” to Vice Chief Tard Biden that Maliki was all Bush’s fault and “I realized” all the blah blah frickin blah that Maliki was bad news blah.
Sooooo, in order to stay in good graces of the powers that be in DC, he decided to say all the right things along the meme of “Bush bad, Maliki crap, etc.” and presto voila, he keeps his job. And he gets to hob knob with the WAPO tards. Sweet!
Yep, got it.
This is like a bad dream. This type of thinking that we can muscle in on an ally and call the shots on who the ally's legal representative should be has occurred before. We did it in Vietnam when JFK signed off on the assassination of South Vietnam's leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, by General Duong Van "Big" Minh. The net effect of that decision was to signal to other leaders in Southeast Asia that we were not dangerous allies to have around.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was the leader of Cambodia at the time, took the logical next step and kicked all American advisors out of Cambodia. He then declared Cambodia to be a neutral party in the Vietnam War.
This was the key factor in turning the Vietnam War into the drawn out affair it become. Before Cambodia became neutral, the Ho Chi Minh trail didn't exist. After Cambodia became neutral, the front upon which the war was fought expanded by several orders of magnitude down the length of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam.
Put simply, without the Ho Chi Minh trail, North Vietnam would have had to fight a conventional war on a static East-West front with American air power being decisive due to a much reduced triple canopy cover that otherwise protected the Viet Cong's supply lines in Cambodia. As such, the front upon which the war was fought would have stablized in the early years of the war instead of in 1973 after Operation Linebacker and Operation Linebacker II had occurred.
The upshot of all this is that we should be very careful in interfering in the internal politics of allies who are at war with a mutual enemy. It is very hard to predict what the fallout will be when we engage in such activities and the consequences will almost always be bad because will be shown to be unreliable, even dangerous, allies who cannot be trusted.
Bookmark...
We didn’t stick with anybody. We left.
Amazing article, even if only half of it is true.
What should have happened is that American governors should have been installed in Baghdad, Damascus, Riyadh, and Islamabad, to protect the waves of Christian missionaries who would by now have educated the entire under age 15 population.
Playing “good Muslim vs. bad Muslim” was a fool’s errand from the start.
Bush the elder stopped the Gulf War short of Baghdad and left Saddam in power. What if we had done the same after 9/11?
Democracy in the Middle East seems sadly un-importable.
I don’t fault George W. Bush. We had to react after 9/11. Perhaps the USSR model of installing puppet regimes like Ceausescu and Honecker might have been the better option.
Some say the Shah of Iran was an American puppet, and that worked till Carter abandoned him.
Kill or send Saddam’s sons to Gitmo (to let him know we mean business), and prop up Saddam to keep the factions in line and pay him for his troubles. But never let him forget he’s just a puppet. And just keep the oil flowing.
"After helping to bring him to power in 2006, I argued in 2010 that Maliki had to go. I felt guilty lobbying against my friend Abu Isra, but this was not personal. Vital U.S. interests were on the line. Thousands of American and Iraqi lives had been lost and trillions of dollars had been spent to help advance our national security, not the ambitions of one man or one party."
Let's see, who was President in 2010? Who ignored our national interests in Iraq? Who blew it on safeguarding the hard won peace?
Gee, out the obscure State Senator who voted "present" all the time, it actually turns out that that voting present was an excellent indicator for how Obama acts in office.
Obama voted present on Iraq. However, he was very active in 2010 in attacking the Tea Party by weaponizing the IRS, OSHA, EPA and FBI.
bump
How rare is it for a senior advisor to administrations of both parties to admit that his advice was wrong? And to recommend a change of course in our policy when the wrong decision had a chance to be corrected?
This admission alone makes Mr. Khedery article worth reading. The original policy to go into Iraq was supported by most of the politicians of both parties and we have to live with it, not continue to debate it as though history can be changed and blame assessed.
It’s clear to me, as it is detailed by Mr. Khedery, that we made a wrong choice on Maliki and perhaps had a chance to retrieve it before we packed up and left the country, giving up any leverage or influence we might have had.
We did not lose Iraq because we stuck with Maliki...we lost Iraq because O Drama pulled out almost all the troops and refused to negotiate the agreement for them to stay and be protected if they had to protect themselves from attack. Maliki is terrible, but he wasn’t the one who pulled out the troops and left a vacuum for ISIS.
We (by “we” I mean the Useful Idiot Democrats and Liberals), stuck with Obama, and lost Iraq.