[Regal]

“If we had left the troops in Iraq all this waffling would not be necessary “
____________

Not giving Obama a pass of any kind, but the troops that we shouild have left in IRaq is the Iraqi Army. Dissolving that army, the army we spent decades building as a buffer to the Soviets, was a big mistake. Not one drop of American blood should be spilled for Iraq, or Syria, or ever Jordan!

[what's up]

And I suppose we should have left Japan and Germany to their own devices as well?

10's of thousands of troops left in Japan and Germany after WW2 and a few hundred left in Iraq? Really?

[piasa]

We didn’t spend “decades” building the Iraqi army as a buffer to the Soviets, Iraq was a Soviet client state right through to the dissolving of the USSR and then it resumed as a client of Russia, France and Milosevic.
We didn’t have access to the Iraqi army until after the invasion of March 2003.

[piasa]

...Which is why when we invaded, the weapons left behind by Saddam’s forces were Soviet, French, and lest I forget, Chinese.
We’ve supported the Kurds in Iraq against Saddam Hussein since Nixon’s time and their forces never were “dissolved.”