RSN Fundraising Banner
FB Share
Email This Page
add comment

writing for godot

ISIS Is Obama’s Fault for Not Leaving Troops in Iraq, Right?

Print
Written by LetsFixThisCountry.org   
Wednesday, 08 July 2015 07:09
In war, truth is the first casualty, wrote Aeschylus. In their zeal to blame the President for everything gone wrong, politicians and pundits on the right count on Americans' diminished memories. They have discovered no one challenges their blaming Obama for the rise of ISIS because he did not leave troops behind in Iraq. So a Bill O'Reilly can safely say…

"There is no question that pulling all US troops out of Iraq directly led to groups like ISIS quickly achieving power there".

…confident that he will leave his audience nodding in agreement.
Never mind that the Iraqi government denied Obama's request to leave in country first the 10,000 and then the 3,000 that he proposed. Never mind what really happened when reduction to a simple lie works so well. John McCain says the same:

"The fact that they didn't leave a residual force in Iraq is the reason why we're facing ISIS today".

Never mind that ending the U.S. troop presence in Iraq was "an overwhelmingly popular demand among Iraqis", as reported at the time. You'd never know that the withdrawal had been agreed to three years earlier from New York Times columnist David Brooks, who just said on the PBS NewsHour,

"the drawdown of troops was too fast, one of the biggest mistakes of the Obama presidency was to draw down the troops too fast."

You wouldn't know that Iraq chose to push us out if you read Jonah Goldberg at the National Review, who wrote, "Obama chose to pull troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible". When that magazine's editor Rich Lowry said Obama is a commander-in-chief with "a history of all but walking away from his military commitments" and on "Meet the Press" said that he "abandoned the war in Iraq", Lowry preferred to forget that Iraq Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was unwilling to risk a confrontation with Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who controlled the largest bloc of parliament. U.S. troops remaining on Iraqi soil? The al-Sadr faction would have none of it.

Yet a common phrase we hear from the blame throwers on the right is that Obama should have "tried harder" to negotiate keeping troops in Iraq. Surely the al-Sadr brigades that fought against and killed our troops would have been swayed by a sophomoric good old college try.

Bill Kristol, one of the original and unreconstructed neocons wrote an editorial in his Weekly Standard magazine titled “We Were Right to Fight in Iraq” that said Obama...

"removed all U.S. troops from Iraq at the end of 2011" and "threw away hard-earned gains" with "this disastrous policy of withdrawal and retreat".

No mention that the departure was in compliance with a "status of forces agreement" (SOFA) that called for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2011 — all 40,000 troops by then — an agreement that was signed not by Obama, but by George W. Bush in his last year in office. Obama would have had to undo an existing agreement to keep troops in country, and do so in the face of an entirely hostile environment among the Iraqis themselves.

As example of the willful amnesia deployed to place blame on Obama, Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff under Bush, lied on Fox's "America's Newsroom" in June a year ago that "not having a status of forces agreement in Iraq is a horrible problem that President Obama is facing, and he created that problem".

Dick Cheney has also forgotten who agreed to the troop removal. A Wall Street Journal piece says he thinks Republicans should "scrutinize" the withdrawal of U.S. troops under Obama.

But nothing tops the shameful attempt to deflect blame away from himself than narcissist Paul Bremer this spring saying,

"ISIS is the creation that happened after we pulled all of our troops out in 2011. That is the key mistake that was made by this administration".

That leaves one gasping for air. Bremer was the disastrous choice of George W. Bush to head the occupation government, the Coalition Provisional Authority, as its chief executive. He infamously made the worst decision of the war by disbanding the army shortly after the invasion, sending home several hundred thousand troops without paychecks but with their weapons who would retaliate by forming the insurgency, and several of them now showing up leading ISIS units. Bremer seems to be s=casting stones in the hopes that people won't realize that, if anyone is responsible for ISIS's rise, it is he more than anyone.

But the big lie about leaving troops behind is they were meant not for combat but only to train Iraq's security forces. Iraq certainly would not have then allowed combat troops to remain. And never mind that a contingent as small as the 3,000 Obama finally proposed would be entirely inadequate to combat the estimated 30,000 ISIS fighters. But the chorus blaming Obama for not leaving that token force behind doesn't want to get into the particulars.


PROTECTING THE TROOPS

All of the claims that Obama "should have tried harder" bury the most inconvenient fact of all: Iraq was unwilling to grant to U.S. troops immunity from prosecution. It would have been out of the question to accede to Iraq's demand that our military (in their country to help them, we might add) be subject to their laws. Imagine a soldier accused of a crime, whether real or trumped up by Iraqi elements wishing us gone, that leads to incarceration in an Iraqi prison, trial in an Iraqi court, and a conceivable death sentence. Imagine an agreement that left our troops open to that. Why does our media quote the fault finders without challenging them on the facts.

"Keep in mind, that wasn't a decision made by me", the President has said. "That was a decision made by the Iraqi government".

Max Boot, a contributing editor at the conservative Weekly Standard, knows better but tried a different tack in a Council of Foreign Relations article. He says the breakdown was the result of the Obama administration's insistence that immunity be ratified by the Iraqi parliament, an impossible hurdle. Bush hadn't demanded that ratification in the 2008 SOFA, he argues. But we had 150,000 troops in Iraq at the time. When a trooper stepped out of line, the U.S. military dealt with its own; our force of arms denied Iraq any prospect of prosecuting our troops. One could say that the Bush administration was shortsighted for its failure to look ahead to when the troop count would wind down to small numbers without immunity protection.

The Obama administration, in contrast, anticipated how vulnerable 10,000 or 3,000 would be to an agreement signed only by an Iraqi leader of the moment and not made into law by the country's parliament.

Last fall along came Leon Panetta, first Obama's CIA director, then secretary of defense, with a memoir in which he says he advocated for a residual force to remain in Iraq "but the President's team at the White House pushed back". The redoubtable ABC reporter Martha Raddatz, who has been to Iraq 21 times, has said the Obama administration originally "wanted 10,000 troops to remain in Iraq — not combat troops, but military advisers, special operations forces, to watch the counter-terrorism effort". That number was reduced to 3,000 in the hope that the smaller contingent would break the logjam with the Iraqis.

Panetta wrote, "To this day, I believe that a small U.S. troop presence in Iraq could have effectively advised the Iraqi military on how to deal with al-Qaeda's resurgence". He was saying that the same Iraqi military that surrendered our weaponry and ran after the U.S. devoted the better part of a decade and billions of dollars to their training would, in his view, performed entirely differently against ISIS had we "advised" them some more.

None of commentariat choose to remember al-Maliki himself saying, "When the Americans asked for immunity, the Iraqi side answered that it was not possible", nor do they mention the headlines then that said "Immunity issue scuttled U.S. troop deal".

Rather than listen to Panetta blame shifting, why not ask someone who had actual war fighting experience in Iraq — and in Anbar Province? Charlie Rose had this conversation with Gen. David Petraeus,

Rose: As you know, there are people in the political world who will say "if the U.S. had left troops in Iraq, we would not be watching the rise of ISIS".

Petraeus: Well look, I supported leaving troops, as a number did around the situation room table, indeed the President, if we could have gotten...

Rose: But would leaving troops have led to impeding the rise of ISIS?

Petraeus: It's arguable, I'd like to have tested the proposition, but it is by no means certain. There were other agreements made at the time with President Obama's support that were not consummated and required no boots on the ground, no uniforms but would have helped him enormously; even those were not allowed to be brought to bear. I was involved in that so there is no guarantee that having them on the ground would have changed everything.

From LetsFixThisCountry.org.
Other articles at http://bityurl.com/b5a736

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
Email This Page

 

THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.

RSNRSN