![Iraq appears on the verge of civil war and some blame former President George W. Bush. Here's why they're wrong. [Credit: al Jazeera America]](https://i0.wp.com/www.dougsbriefcase.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/credit-al-jazeera-america.jpg)
Iraq appears on the verge of civil war and some blame former President George W. Bush. Here’s why they’re wrong. [Credit: al Jazeera America]
The Obama presidency’s leading malfeasance lies in its belief that finding someone to blame for a problem is as good as solving it. So it is little surprise that my recent post on Iraq, in which I argued against US military intervention, would spur comments that former President George W. Bush is to blame for the renewed fighting.
Sectarian violence did not begin with the American invasion of Iraq. Its roots run deep. During the 1980s, for example, Iraq’s current Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, defected to Iran to lead a contingent of Iraqi Shiites in battle against his own country. Saddam Hussein curbed this fractious impulse only by shedding Iraqi blood on an epic scale. Though accurate estimates are impossible, he may have been responsible for the deaths of as many as one million Iraqis. By late 2008, this violence had been kept in check through the formation of a broadly representative government rather than the heavy hand of a ruthless dictator.
And while it is true that the status of forces agreement that President Bush concluded in November 2008 called for the withdrawal of all US troops by the end of 2011, the document was viewed both by Americans and Iraqis as a transitional one, designed to give the newly elected President three years to work out the war’s final terms. Maliki and the Obama Administration did negotiate over keeping US forces in Iraq. Maliki wanted American soldiers to stay, but could not come to terms with the White House on the rules governing their continued presence. Many in our diplomatic corps and military have strongly criticized the Administration for failing to reach an accord with Maliki.
“You just had this policy vacuum and this apathy,” Lieutenant General Michael Barbero, our former deputy commander in Iraq, said of the Administration in an interview with the New Yorker. “Now we have no leverage in Iraq. Without any troops there, we’re just another group of guys.”
“Everything that has happened there was not just predictable,” Barbero added. “We predicted it.”
President Obama’s failure to negotiate a status of forces agreement that would have allowed the US to maintain a presence in Iraq for training and counterterrorism purposes made the current crisis inevitable. Maintaining such a presence would not have entailed the annual expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars or required us to wage war for a hundred years.
Nor would it have been without precedent. Once war concludes, it is not unusual to keep soldiers on the field to consolidate gains and prevent new outbreaks of violence. US forces remain in Korea more than 60 years after the negotiation of an armistice. American soldiers stayed in Bosnia and Kosovo long after our wars there ended.
The purpose of such deployments is not to perpetuate war, but to preserve peace. That is especially necessary in places like Korea, where a certifiably insane dictator continually threatens his neighbor to the south, and in the Balkans, where ethnic animosities never seem far from the surface.
It was also necessary in Iraq, where a fragile peace had been secured after years of bloodshed. That is not my assessment alone. It is what President Obama proclaimed in announcing that he would withdraw all American military personnel from Iraq. He said, in December 2011, that the country was “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” and that it had “a representative government that was elected by its people.”
That state of affairs was hard won, largely through a military surge that President Bush ordered in 2007 after years of bloody and unsuccessful occupation marred by civil war and American casualties. The surge could not undo this damage, but it achieved its objectives. Sectarian strife subsided. Sunni tribal chieftains threw in with the popularly elected government in Baghdad, a government that, as President Obama would later note, represented Iraq’s diverse ethnic and religious population.
President Bush left Iraq stable and viable; President Obama left it behind.
It isn’t entirely clear why. The President has little patience with those who do not bend to his superior wisdom, including members of Congress and a growing list of world leaders. It is quite possible that we cut Iraq loose because the President tired of negotiating with Maliki.
It is also possible that he made a calculated political decision. President Obama was a long-time critic of the war and used it in the 2008 primaries against Hillary Clinton, who had voted in favor of intervention. As a Senator, he opposed the surge. With his reelection less than a year away, the prison in Guantanamo still open and two wars still being waged, he may have decided that his electoral prospects would improve if he declared the Iraq war won and left the predictable consequences for another day.
But whether the decision resulted from political calculation or a lack of negotiating skills, the result was the same: the stability in Iraq that he hailed soon unraveled.
The President seems to blame Maliki for this mess. It is true that Maliki is a divisive figure. It is also true that he practiced the politics of division more aggressively once it was clear that US troops would not remain. He ordered the arrest of the country’s Vice President, a Sunni Muslim, just a week after the President announced that he would withdraw all of our forces. Our diminished influence in Iraq left Maliki free to do things that provoked violent reactions from Sunni extremists.
The President is urging Maliki to form a more inclusive government. Secretary of State John Kerry has even suggested that if Maliki were to resign, it “might wind up being very salutory” for the country. But events so far are militating against such possibilities. The increasingly sectarian conflict has paradoxically strengthened Maliki, with even moderate Shiite critics appearing to close ranks behind the leader.
President Obama, to his credit, is proceeding fairly cautiously, perhaps having learned from prior missteps. He has ordered more troops into Baghdad to protect our embassy, a prudent step in view of the terrorist attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi, whose alleged mastermind has been apprehended. And he is speaking privately with Congressional leaders of both parties before announcing his intentions, a welcome change from his vacillations on Syria and his decision to swap five Taliban leaders for an American captive. He has so far ruled out the deployment of ground troops and there are reports that he has decided against airstrikes as well.
If those reports are accurate, then perhaps he has cooled to the idea of coordinating military operations with Iran. Iran has fed turmoil in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and its leaders seem unsettled by the most recent turn of events. It is not our place to help them out.
Whatever he decides to do, there are many lessons here for the President. Among them is the need to keep a sufficient force in Afghanistan once we withdraw from active combat. Another is that when we reduce our influence in troubled parts of the world, peace and tranquility rarely follow. Other, less benign forces fill the void, creating crises that we can do little to allay.
Most of all, he can perhaps shake his habit of blaming others for problems that he was elected to solve.
It is late in his tenure to be learning such lessons. But perhaps not too late.
You can’t have it both ways by arguing as you are now that sectarian violence is decades old and as you did earlier that the civil war started when we pulled our troops. Sectarian violence started as soon as Bush invaded Iraq. Under Bush we lost 3000+ of our own as we were caught then in the middle of the civil war. As Powell warned about — if you break it you own it. Bush broke Iraq. The violence was kept in check by adding more troops, and by no means were the various groups living in a harmonious democracy at the time Bush left. Bush did not leave behind a stable Iraq, even though he had carte blanche for almost six years — when it was his own administration which had promised a relatively quick end for the war during the time it was drumming up support for the war. The US people wanted our troops out of there. Every poll overwhelmingly supported getting our troops out of there. Infact Obama’s withdrawal schedule from Iraq was slower than the one he initially proposed when he ran in 2008. It is simply incorrect to say that the American people viewed the Bush SOFA as transitional. We had an election in 2008 where Iraq was very much discussed and we had two candidates whose views were in stark contrast, and where the American people very much wanted to get out of Iraq. I doubt if Maliki wanted us to stay — after all he is the one who signed the document with Bush which laid out the timetable for the troop withdrawal — but in any case it was the American people who wanted to get out of Iraq. And how long had we been training the Iraqis? It was none other than the heralded General Petraeus who had been put in charge of training the Iraqis several years ago. How long have we been training the Iraqis forces? A lot longer than we train our own troops. The Iraqi problem is a lot, lot deeper than we simply did not leave behind troops for training and counter-terrorism.
And you don’t even seem to have grasped the lesson that really should have been learned — that it was a big mistake for Bush to have invaded Iraq in the first place. After trillions of dollars lost and thousands of US lives (not to mention loss of Iraqi lives) — that is the first thing we should have concluded.
And I do not know how you can take what I wrote to conclude about “Obama presidency’s leading malfeasance “. I am not associated in any way with Obama, the Obama administration, or with Democrats. Or for that matter, unlike you, I am not associated with Bush, the Bush administration, or with Republicans in any way. I am speaking here as a complete non partisan. As someone who has no axe to grind and no partisan affiliations either past or present this is what I would say are the top two lessons of the Iraq fiasco:
1. Do not start a war based on lies or misrepresentations.
2. Do not create and leave intractable problems for your successors.
I certainly did not mean to suggest that you were an employee of the Obama Administration, though I would think you would not find the suggestion to be insulting. My point was that the President’s habit of mind, which his handlers and supporters emulate, is to suggest that someone else is responsible for a problem that he was elected to solve. I won’t rehash the argument over whether President Bush lied to build support for the War in Iraq. I don’t believe that he did. In any event, I can’t disagree with your point that wars should not be based on lies and misrepresentations. As to your second point, if Mr. Obama believed that the problems facing our country were intractable, why did he run for President? And why, in running, did he insist that he could resolve those problems? If he’s not up the task, he should never have sought the office. With respect to Iraq, President Obama himself did not represent its condition as an intractable problem, but as an accomplishment. He heralded the broadly representative Maliki government and the end of ethnic violence. His Vice President went further, proclaiming that Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this Administration” [http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2010/02/vice-president-biden-iraq-could-be-one-of-the-great-achievements-of-this-administration/]. So they didn’t see Iraq as an intractable problem left by their predecessor, but as a foreign policy triumph. The mayhem that is engulfing the country erupted after the ill-considered withdrawal of US troops, something that he is at least tacitly acknowledging with his decision to deploy US “advisors” to Iraq. Would it not have been better to have negotiated a residual American force in Iraq when the situation was manageable, rather than intervening after things predictably deteriorated?
I am neither a handler nor supporter of Obama, and consider myself a progressive which Obama clearly is not. Why did Obama run and why did he put lipstick on the Iraqi pig is a question better left to ask him. Sadly nobody expects politicians to be truthful, and truthfulness gets one nowhere in politics.
“Would it not have been better to have negotiated a residual American force in Iraq when the situation was manageable, rather than intervening after things predictably deteriorated?”
No for many different reasons. We cannot continue to keep baby sitting the Iraqis forever. Americans wanted US troops out of there. It was Bush himself who committed to that. Keeping troops in there is extremely costly, and you are only prolonging things which are inevitable. Keep in mind that it was the Bush administration which severely lowballed estimates of what the Iaq war cost would be. It is pretty easy to say — let us keep troops there. For how long? And at what cost?
Let’s try to sort this out. I am not trying to have it both ways when I say that sectarian strife in Iraq was around long before 2003. That is simply a fact that the Ottomans, British colonialists and Saddam Hussein dealt with in various ways and with varying degrees of success. Saddam employed especially brutal means, including the use of chemical weapons against Iraqis of Kurdish ethnicity. The US invasion displaced Hussein and our botched occupation failed to quell the resulting ethnic violence until the surge of 2007. After that, both Obama and Biden declared not only that sectarian violence had subsided but that a stable government broadly representative of all interests was in place. I understand that you don’t believe that Obama and Biden are sufficiently progressive for your tastes, but if you don’t accept their judgment — or Bush’s — on the condition of the country in 2011, I’m not sure what to say. Evidently, you think that all of them were being untruthful, truth being an impediment in politics. I don’t accept that assessment.
As to your point about public opinion, it is true that by 2006 the majority of the public opposed the war. But in 2003, a very strong majority supported it and the voters re-elected Bush in 2004. It is absolutely the case that Bush and Obama in 2008 agreed that our combat role in Iraq should end. The only question had to do with the terms of our withdrawal. On that, Bush properly deferred to his successor, giving him three years to negotiate terms with Maliki. I would commend to you section 5 of the New Yorker piece that I linked to in my original post for a detailed account of the frustration of our military and diplomatic corps with how the White House mishandled that. In any event, you seem to think that it was unnecessary and/or too costly to leave some troops behind to support the Iraqi government and help maintain peace, something we had done in Bosnia, Kosovo, Korea and elsewhere. There were costs to all of those deployments, costs which continue to accrue in Korea. You seem to think that saving whatever money we saved by not leaving behind a small contingent in Iraq is worth all of the bloodshed, chaos, atrocities and inhumanity that have resulted from our poorly conceived withdrawal. We differ on that point.
We also differ on the question of whether the 2003 invasion made the current circumstances in Iraq inevitable. We’ve been over that point several times and we will have to agree to disagree. I will say only this: you seem to believe that the Iraqis would have been better off left to the tendermercies of Saddam Hussein. I would suggest that you review his record and perhaps talk to people who had the misfortune of living under his rule.
When Saddam was using chemical gas, it was none other than Rumsfeld who went to Baghdad and shook hands with him. Saddam was a brutal dictator, nobody disputes that, but did we really have to invade Iraq? Can you admit that it was a mistake for your administration to invade Iraq?
Please spare me the part about “believe that the Iraqis would have been better off left to the tendermercies of Saddam Hussein”. If you believe that, have the courage to say that personally to George Herbert Walker Bush and Collin Powell.
Obama, like all successful politicians, was trying to put the best spin on Iraq and hoping that things would work out. Bush (W) in 2000 promised to cut taxes and not raise the deficit. By the time he left in 2008 the surplus had turned to a huge deficit, but so what — he got elected for 8 years and the fact that he said such nice things about you can have your cake and eat it too helped him get elected. We Americans have a short memory span, and love the guy can spin us such optimistic scenarios. A realistic guy would get pilloried right before the primaries. Imagine in 2000 if Bush had told us that yes you will get a tax cut, but there may be a recession and the deficit will go through the roof. Would he have a chance of getting elected? Not a chance. So politicians say all kinds of beautiful words, and Obama is no different in putting the lipstick on the pig.
Bush did not “defer to his successor”, but rather signed a pact with the Iraqis which cited the end of 2009 for the pull out of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities, and 2011 as the fixed deadline for removal of U.S. military presence in country.
We differ on a lot of things and let us leave it at that. The reason why some of us are so opposed to Iraq is especially because your administration promised us that we would be greeted as liberators, promised us that it would be a short war which won’t cost us much, and yet ended up devastating the area and leaving behind a long term instability. Had you folks not burned through trillions of dollars it would be more palatable to keep on accruing these costs.
Bush replaced a brutal dictator with a popularly elected and broadly representative government. He failed to anticipate the disruption that would cause. In 2007, he changed course, launching a counterinsurgency that both quelled the violence and won the critical backing of Sunni tribal chieftains. For the first time, Iraq had a popularly elected, broadly representative government, a welcome break from the Turkish and British colonialists and the maniacal rule of Saddam Hussein. When Biden called the stability of this government a “great achievement” for the Administration, you believe that he and Obama were being “untruthful” or “spinning.” I am taking them at their word.
You believe that the status of forces agreement that Bush signed after Obama was elected was immutable law. No one — not Bush, not Obama, not Maliki — viewed it that way. Negotiations dragged on for months (critics say that Obama should have started them sooner, taking better advantage of the three years that Bush gave him) between the Obama and Maliki administrations over a revised agreement that would have allowed for a residual US force. Such negotiations would have been entirely unnecessary if the parties thought the 2008 agreement was the last word. Our failure to conclude the agreement is widely viewed by military and diplomatic participants in that process as a failure. Iraq began to deteriorate almost immediately after Obama announced our complete withdrawal, with Maliki calling for the arrest of his Vice President, a Sunni Muslim.
I understand and respect your opposition to the war in Iraq. You are certainly not alone in that. But I would hope you would at least be open to considering that, even if the decision to invade the country in 2003 was wrong and the war too costly in blood and treasure, Iraq had achieved a strong measure of peace and stability by 2011.
“He failed to anticipate the disruption that would cause.”
No kidding. All he had to do was call his dad and speak to folks like George HW Bush, Brent Scowcroft, or Collin Powell. This is exactly what Scowcroft and Powell were saying. Bush did not “fail to anticipate”. He did not want to listen and consider anything other that it would be a cakewalk and that democracy would bloom. That is what happens when the “decider” is full of hubris and ideology.
“When Biden called the stability of this government a “great achievement” for the Administration, you believe that he and Obama were being “untruthful” or “spinning.” I am taking them at their word.”
If Iraq was so stable then why are we even discussing it? Let us face it — the genie is out of the bottle and it is a big power struggle among Sunnis and Shias in a wide swath of the middle east. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Gulf countries, Syria, etc. are all in it in a huge jockey of power. As I said earlier — The Iraqi problem is a lot, lot deeper than we simply did not leave behind troops for training and counter-terrorism. And terrorism is a really poor way to describe what is going in there. It is essentially fighting to grab power.
“You believe that the status of forces agreement that Bush signed after Obama was elected was immutable law”
Nothing in life is immutable. Fact remains that Bush signed it. Fact remains that the American people wanted out of Iraq. Fact remains that Obama campaigned on getting out of Iraq, McCain wanted to stay there “maybe a hundred years”, and Obama won handily. Fact remains that Maliki never asked Obama to have US troops stay over.
US troops staying over is not the panacea that some of you are claiming. And it is extremely expensive, with no end in sight. And once the troops are gone you are back to square one.
You seem impervious to the facts on three points:
1. Keeping a residual force in Iraq would have cost too much, lasted forever and, in any event, done no good. We have kept a residual force in Korea for more than 60 years. Other, more recent, deployments that extended far beyond the end of hostilities include Bosnia and Kosovo. In all cases, peace has been maintained in very difficult circumstances and costs have not been prohibitive.
2. We could not keep a residual force in Iraq because Bush signed a status of forces agreement in 2008. The facts again suggest otherwise. Maliki did want a US presence maintained and he wanted it to be of sufficient size to make a difference. Obama tried to negotiate with him but, as in other negotiations in which he has engaged, this one ended in failure.
3. There was no point in keeping US forces there because sectarian violence was never quelled and a broadly representative government was not in place. Obama, Biden, Bush, Maliki and observers of the situation were “being untruthful” or “spinning” or something when they claimed that Iraq in 2011 was a very different place from what it had been in 2006.
Your views do not become more convincing with repetition. Indeed, Obama would not agree with any of them, so far as I can see. He never argued against maintaining a US presence because it was too costly or that it was unsupported by pubic opinion or that he beat McCain or that Maliki didn’t want us there. Obama never claimed that the status of forces agreement signed in 2008 tied his hands. And, of course, he and Biden regarded Iraq’s condition in 2011 as a foreign policy success, contrasting it sharply with the state of affairs prior to the surge.
You have to believe all of these things to support your contention that Bush irreparably ruined Iraq in 2003. The genie, as you say, escaped the bottle when the US launched its invasion. Everything we’ve done since then has been ineffectual and pointless, an unconscionable waste of blood and treasure.
But the world didn’t begin in 2003. Ethnic and religious violence would not have erupted during the US occupation had grievances not already existed. And it was Saddam Hussein, after all, whose brutal repression of Shiites and Kurds turned Iraq into an ethnic cauldron. Perhaps the genie actually got out of the bottle when he took power in 1979. Then again, Saddam’s policies were little more than an extension of his predecessor’s, so perhaps things took an irreversible turn for the worse when the Baathists secured power in 1968. But Sunni dominance of Iraq really began with its winning independence from Great Britain in 1932. The succeeding decades were marked by coups, unrest, suppression and ethnic violence. Perhaps 1932 was the fateful year. Then again, perhaps things permanently went south when the European powers carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I. It was they who drew lines in the sand between, for example, French Syria and British Iraq, ignoring ethnic and religious differences between Kurds, Sunnnis and Shiites. Perhaps the genie of continual warfare and violence left the bottle back then. One could go on through the Ottoman centuries and to the Abbasid caliphate, which ISIS vows to restore. Maybe the Middle East was forever doomed shortly after the death of Muhammad when the Sunni-Shiite rift was born.
The point is that, while decisions have lasting consequences, those consequences are not irreversible. Conditions change and new leaders arise and with them new opportunities to affect the course of events. My problem with our current President is that he so often acts as though he were helpless, as someone who “inherited” (one of his favorite terms) problems that he can’t really be expected to solve. When things go badly, he simply blames someone else for creating the problem. His apologists have adopted this habit, blaming others (usually President Bush) for existing problems, suggesting that Obama can’t be expected to solve problems that his predecessors created.
Obama was elected, as you point out, precisely because of the problems that existed. People were disillusioned with the Iraq War and outraged by the financial meltdown and Wall Street bailouts. Obama was elected, in other words, to solve problems, not to blame others for them. He has been in the White House for nearly six years. It’s time for him to take responsibility for the state of affairs, including the current mess in Iraq.
And my point about intractable problems was not that Obama could not fix the broken humpty dumpty. The point was that not nobody could fix the broken humpty dumpty.
There is probably a cute twitter line that can be constructed from this, but there is something really surreal about a Bush administration member publicly complaining about Obama following an Iraq timetable that was negotiated, approved and signed by Bush.
1. Iraq is no Bosnia or Kosovo. You haven’t even told us how many US troops were needed. Or for how long? Or in what capacity? And how would they operate without the immunity that the Iraqis were steadfast in denying? The Iraq war was sold to us as one which would not cost us much, so it is only natural for us to be highly skeptical of your cost claims.
2. You misrepresent my position. I have listed many reasons why our troops should have been out, including the fact that American people wanted out of Iraq. Even today a poll suggests that American people don’t want US troops in there. If negotiations were that simple why did Bush sign on the dotted line an agreement with Maliki which set 2011 as the date when all US forces would be withdrawn? And saying that nobody expected it to be followed is no excuse. Why did you folks sign that agreement? You claim Maliki was all for a sufficient force US strength. Then why wasn’t that part of the SOFA Bush signed?
3. If Iraq was a very different place and stable, then why are we even discussing it today? Because it wasn’t stable.
Obama would certainly agree with my arguments that the US people wanted out of Iraq, and that getting out of Iraq was a campaign promised fulfilled on his part.
I agree that Iraqi differences began much before 2003, but I still maintain that the 2003 invasion was the catalyst for the current problems.
It is certainly the job of Obama to fix problems, but it is very undignified for those who caused these problems to begin with (like dear leader Cheney) to start bashing Obama on the very problems that they created. Bush has maintained a dignified silence, much to his credit.
On the first point, I am no military strategist. The number of troops left behind would have been dictated by security needs. We have around 30,000 troops in Korea today. Use that as a guideline.
As to the SOFA that Bush signed, I’ve addressed that point repeatedly. It gave the President-Elect three years to develop an Iraq policy and reach an agreement with Maliki. Obviously, that wasn’t enough time. We still don’t have an Iraq policy.
Iraq is unstable today because Obama withdrew all US troops.
But let’s look again at your point on public opinion. It is interesting that public opposition to the war mattered so much to the President and public opposition to his health plan matters so little. But let’s say you’re right. Let’s say that he decided not to leave a residual force in Iraq because he believed that it’s what the public wanted and what he was elected to do. If that’s the case, why all the hand-wringing about the predictable outcome? Why did Kerry fly over to meet with every Iraqi politician in captivity? Why are we sending “advisers?” Why are we contemplating drone strikes and other military options?
If the President acted out of the motives you suggest, he should say this: “In 2008, you elected me to withdraw all of our troops from Iraq, a war that you strongly opposed. The results of that withdrawal were predictable. With us gone from the region, Iran would become the dominant player in Iraq and would exert enormous influence over the Shiite-dominated government. That would, in turn, provoke a Sunni response that would threaten to reignite the sectarian violence that we had helped suppress. That is what we are witnessing today in Iraq. ISIS, whose objective we support in Syria, has gained strength in Iraq. You elected me to get us out of Iraq and public opinion polls show that you don’t want us to go back there. I hear you. Tonight I am announcing that the US will not intervene militarily under any circumstances in Iraq, including an Iranian invasion. We will, of course, pursue a diplomatic resolution and I may ask Congress to send humanitarian aid to those displaced and otherwise affected by this outbreak of violence. I know that some of you believe that we should do more. But you are the same people who supported the 2003 invasion. You were wrong then and you are wrong now. It is difficult to stand aside as atrocities are committed, but they are not our problem and correcting them is not our responsibility. Let us pray that the violence soon ends and that its victims are few.”
No, you are still ducking the question. Why did you guys sign on the dotted line pledging to withdraw all US troops by 2011? If, as you claim Maliki wanted a sufficient size US presence after 2011, why did you not sign it in the SOFA? Putting it in the SOFA still gives the President elect 3 years to develop a new Iraq policy and sign a new SOFA. If those troops were so necessary as you claim, why didn’t you codify it in the SOFA you folks signed? It is a lot easier to bash the other guy than to admit your own mistakes.
I have answered the question repeatedly. You don’t like the answer. The 2008 elections were over. Bush was handing over power to his successor. It was not for him to negotiate terms with Maliki, but to give Obama time to formulate his own policy. Obama understood that. Maliki understood that. That is why they sought to negotiate a SOFU that would provide for a residual force. Obama offered up 3500 troops, a fraction of the number that his own military advisers had recommended. Maliki saw that for what it was: a lack of commitment by Obama to Iraq’s stability. Our troops left and Maliki signed on with the Iranians, ordering the arrest of his Sunni VP. To this day, Obama himself does not claim that the SOFU tied his hands. Only you do. Nor does Obama claim that he was constrained by public opinion to withdraw all of our troops.
So your position basically comes down to this: you hate Bush. Got it.
To set the record straight — I do not hate former President George W Bush. I have been quite critical of his policies, just as you have been quite critical of the policies of Obama. So does your position basically come down to — you hate Obama?
Actually, if you read the original post, you will see that I support the way the President has responded to this most recent crisis. I wrote that before he announced the deployment of 300 military advisers, something that I’m not sure is a good idea. I also was critical of suggestions by John McCain and others to undertake airstrikes, whether manned or unmanned. So, no, I do not hate President Obama.
And actually if you read my posts, you will see that I support Bush’s decision to negotiate and sign a SOFA which calls for US troops to be completely out of Iraq by 2011, and that I applauded his decision to not publicly comment on these matters. Plus I supported several of his actions when he was President, but they are not part of the discussion here.
I agree that Bush did Obama a solid by putting the SOFA in place. He waited until after our elections were over to formulate an agreement with Maliki to allow US troops to remain on Iraqi soil for three additional years. He did not — and could not — negotiate a residual troop presence, since he was leaving office after two months. He was in no position to commit his successor to maintain such a presence, so such negotiations would have been pointless. Responsibility for those negotiations fell to Obama and he, unfortunately, proved ill-suited to the task. The New Yorker piece I cited provides a good deal of detail about how this failure came about. A more recent post in the Atlantic argues that even those who fault Bush for the 2003 invasion must hold Obama accountable for withdrawing all of our troops from Iraq. bit.ly/1piFASc
This is the same fierce debate that Rand Paul and Dick Cheney are locked in right now.
Paul responded “I think the same questions could be asked of those who supported the Iraq War. You know, were they right in their predictions? Were there weapons of mass destruction there? Was the war won in 2005, when many of those people said it was won?”
Instead of placing blame on the president, Paul suggested that blame for the unrest in the Middle East can be placed elsewhere.
“I don’t blame President Obama,” Paul said. “Has he really got the solution? Maybe there is no solution. But I do blame those who are for the Iraq War for emboldening Iran. These are the same people now who are petrified of what Iran may become, and I understand some of their worry”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/rand-paul-dick-cheney-iraq-war-108135.html#ixzz35mxlr72J
A few comments on public opinion in response to what has been written. Generally I believe that politicians should respect public opinion. The problem, however, with public opinion is that sometimes it is fickle and subject to manipulation. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, public opinion was not in favor of an Iraq invasion. It was only after a massive disinformation campaign waged relentlessly by Bush, Cheney and their surrogates which warned us of Iraqi WMDs, mushroom clouds, Uranium from Niger (a phrase which the intelligence twice told Bush not to use, but one which the Bush administration kept bringing back for Bush’s speech), selectively leaked information to friendly reporters by Cheney and Libby (this information came out in the Scooter Libby trial), the grave danger we faced if we did not invade, we would be greeted as liberators, the war would quickly end, Iraqi oil money would largely pay for the reconstruction, etc — only then did the public opinion tilt towards the invasion. But after the war it was apparent that we were sold a bag of goods, and once that happened public opinion shifted against the war.
On healthcare I agree that public opinion did not justify that Obama act the way he did, and I think he would have been prudent to wait on that issue.