Sowell: Who Lost Iraq?

Creator Syndicate ^ | June 9, 2015 | Thomas Sowell

[jazusamo]

After the pro-Western government of China was forced to flee to the island of Taiwan in 1949, when the Communists took over mainland China, bitter recriminations in Washington led to the question: "Who lost China?" China was, of course, never ours to lose, though it might be legitimate to ask if a different American policy toward China could have led to a different outcome.

In more recent years, however, Iraq was in fact ours to lose, after U.S. troops vanquished Saddam Hussein's army and took over the country. Today, we seem to be in the process of losing Iraq, if not to ISIS, then to Iran, whose troops are in Iraq fighting ISIS.

While mistakes were made by both the Bush administration and the Obama administration, those mistakes were of different kinds and of different magnitudes in their consequences, though both sets of mistakes are worth thinking about, so that so much tragic waste of blood and treasure does not happen again.

Whether it was a mistake to invade Iraq in the first place is something that will no doubt be debated by historians and others for years to come. But, despite things that could have been done differently in Iraq during the Bush administration, in the end President Bush listened to his generals and launched the military "surge" that crushed the terrorist insurgents and made Iraq a viable country.

The most solid confirmations of the military success in Iraq were the intercepted messages from Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq to their leaders in Pakistan that there was no point sending more insurgents, because they now had no chance of prevailing against American forces. This was the situation that Barack Obama inherited — and lost.

[Kaslin]

You are forgetting that the purpose in 1991 was to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait which they had achieved and we were asked by Kuwait to do so.

[stephenjohnbanker]

” Elect a communist, get a disaster. “

Run a man who openly hates conservatives, and actually campaigned for his opponent,(mCcAIN) get a communist, and a disaster.

Run a wealthy baby killing,pro-gay, founder of Obamacare(Romney), get a communist again, and a disaster.

Anyone who did even a modicum of research on Obama, knew his best friends in America were domestic terrorists....

Alinsky

Cloward

Piven

Ayers

Dohrn

so why should anyone be surprised that Obama backs Islamic terrorists ?

[mrs ippi]

I am quite aware of that and supported that totally but in so doing , it my opinion that we easily could have wiped out Sadaam and grabbed their oil. You do0n’t go to war to build nations. You fight and die to go get stuff.