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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Soul Crusher on June 13, 2014, 05:45:33 AM
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http://www.ijreview.com/2014/06/146912-obama-2011-leaving-behind-stable-self-reliant-iraq
more failures from O-twink
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Obama in 2011: ‘We’re Leaving Behind A Stable And Self-Reliant Iraq’
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11,801Shares By Mike Miller 16 hours ago
As Iraq spirals out of control, it’s become clear that, once again, the Obama administration has been caught off guard. Worse? Given Barack Obama’s assessment in 2011, this should never have happened:
“Today, I can announce that our review is complete, and that the United States will pursue a new strategy to end the war in Iraq through a transition to full Iraqi responsibility.
This strategy is grounded in a clear and achievable goal shared by the Iraqi people and the American people: an Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.
[W]e will work to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative, and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe haven to terrorists.”
How’d that all work out?
In the past seven months, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) - a terrorist group that sprang from al Qaeda - has captured Fallujah and Mosul [and Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's home town], and is now intent on capturing the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.
Now, U.S. officials have not only warned Americans not to travel to Iraq, but have prepared contingency plans to evacuate the U.S. embassy as well.
So how did the administration miscalculate so terribly? How did the events of the last year creep up on it? Lack of focus? Wishful thinking? Consumed by an ever-growing list of scandals? Too much campaigning and not enough governing? All of the above?
Anyway, to be fair, it wasn’t just Obama who referred to ending the war in 2011 a “moment of success.” In 2010, Vice President Biden called Iraq “one of the great achievements of this administration.”
Incidentally, remember when President George W. Bush was lambasted by the left over the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier?
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/06/13/mark_levin_on_iraq_today_one_of_the_greatest_failures_in_us_foreign_policy_history.html
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To be fair, it was just a matter of time before it fell apart, IMO.
As much of a lunatic as he was, Hussein saw to it that anyone who worshipped anything or anyone other than Saddam Hussein would be "neutrelized"; Osama bin Laden reffered to him as the "Socialist infidel." I hoped that something good would come out of Iraq so the blood and treasure we spent wouldn't be for naught, but you can't force democracy on anyone who isn't willing to fight for it and preserve it.
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To be fair, it was just a matter of time before it fell apart, IMO.
As much of a lunatic as he was, Hussein saw to it that anyone who worshipped anything or anyone other than Saddam Hussein would be "neutrelized"; Osama bin Laden reffered to him as the "Socialist infidel." I hoped that something good would come out of Iraq so the blood and treasure we spent wouldn't be for naught, but you can't force democracy on anyone who isn't willing to fight for it and preserve it.
There was stability there for years until Obama refused to get or try to get a status forces agreement
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To be fair, it was just a matter of time before it fell apart, IMO.
To be fair, it was just a matter of time before Bin Laden was caught. Yet, the failureinchief and his supporters did victory laps after the SEALS killed him. He and his lackeys took all the credit. They can't have it both ways. They can't choose to take credit for some achievements and blame others for failures that occur under their watch.
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A small force could have prevented this mess. If they couldn't be left in Iraq they could have stayed in the Kurdish north.
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http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mccain-obama-lost-iraq-2014-6
yup
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To be fair, it was just a matter of time before Bin Laden was caught. Yet, the failureinchief and his supporters did victory laps after the SEALS killed him. He and his lackeys took all the credit. They can't have it both ways. They can't choose to take credit for some achievements and blame others for failures that occur under their watch.
but they will. and no one cares. they just pretend to care. all the left cares about is the gay agenda and the right to have girls get a shit ton of abortions. the rest is just inconvenient details to them.
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McCain placed the blame for the recent turn at the feet of the Obama administration, which pulled U.S. forces out of Iraq by the end of 2011.
"We had it won," McCain said. "Gen. [David] Petraeus had the conflict won, thanks to the surge. If we had left a residual force behind, we would not be facing the crisis we are today. Those are fundamental facts ... The fact is, we had the conflict won. We had a stable government ... But the president wanted out, and now, we are paying a very heavy price. And I predicted it in 2011."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mccain-obama-lost-iraq-2014-6#ixzz34X4M6pa0
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but they will. and no one cares. they just pretend to care. all the left cares about is the gay agenda and the right to have girls get a shit ton of abortions. the rest is just inconvenient details to them.
They are a sad pathetic bunch. Aren't they?
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/06/13/militants-vow-to-march-on-baghdad-as-obama-administration-mulls-response
LMFAO - between Kerry and Obama hard to tell who is worse
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ISIL militants 'executed 1,700 Shiite soldiers', UN alarmed
Hürriyet ^ | June/13/2014
Posted on 6/13/2014 11:32:15 AM by DeaconBenjamin
Concerns are growing over executions and mounting abuses by militants led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), amid a warning from the United Nations that hundreds of people were killed, many of them summarily executed, after the seizure of Mosul.
“The full extent of civilian casualties is not yet known but reports received by UNAMI, the U.N. mission in Iraq, to this point suggest that the number of people killed in recent days may run into the hundreds and the number of wounded is said to be approaching 1,000,” Rupert Colville, the spokesman of the U.N.’s human rights chief Navi Pillay, told reporters in Geneva on June 13. UNAMI has its own network of contacts and had interviewed some of the 500,000 who fled Mosul, he said. A further 40,000 people were estimated to have fled from Tikrit and Samara, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Reports of retribution attacks and rape
The statement came as reports suggest that the ISIL militants executed 1,700 Shiite soldiers who surrendered in Tikrit on June 12. “We’ve received reports of the summary execution of Iraqi army soldiers during the capture of Mosul and of 17 civilians in one particular street in Mosul city on June 11,” Colville said. The “great majority” of the militants were Iraqis, Colville said, citing UNAMI reports. Prisoners released by the militants from Mosul prison had been looking to exact revenge on those responsible for their incarceration and some went to Tikrit and killed seven former prison officers there, Colville said.
Meanwhile, leading Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has called on Iraqis to take up arms against militants marching on Baghdad. Thrusting further to the southeast after their seizure of Mosul and Tikrit, ISIL entered two towns in Diyala province bordering Iran on June 13. Saadiyah and Jalawla had fallen to the insurgents after government troops fled their positions, along with several villages around the Himreen Mountains that have long been a hideout for militants, security sources said.
“Citizens who are able to bear arms and fight terrorists, defending their country and their people and their holy places, should volunteer and join the security forces to achieve this holy purpose,” al-Sistani’s representative announced on his behalf during the main weekly prayers in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala. The elderly al-Sistani, who rarely appears in public, is the highest religious authority for the Shiites in Iraq.
Al-Sistani’s call to defend the country came as U.S. President Barack Obama said he was “exploring all options” to save Iraq’s security forces from collapse.
Obama said Iraq was going to need “more help from the United States and from the international community” to strengthen security forces that Washington spent billions of dollars in training and equipping before withdrawing its own troops in 2011. “Our national security team is looking at all the options ... I don’t rule out anything,” he said. One option under consideration is the use of drone strikes, like those controversially deployed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, a U.S. official told Agence France-Presse.
Separately, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry urged Iraq’s political factions to unite against the jihadists. “Make no mistake, this needs to be a real wake-up call for all of Iraq’s political leaders. Now is the time for Iraq’s leaders to come together and show unity,” Kerry said on a visit to London. Iraq was facing a “brutal enemy” that poses a threat to U.S. interests, as well as those of its allies in Europe and the Middle East, Kerry said. He added that given the gravity of the situation, he would anticipate “timely decisions” from President Obama in tackling the challenge. “We are laser-focused on dealing with the crisis ahead,” he said.
The Iraqi Interior Ministry said it had adopted a new security plan for Baghdad to protect it from the advancing jihadists. “The plan consists of intensifying the deployment of forces, and increasing intelligence efforts and the use of technology such as [observation] balloons and cameras and other equipment,” ministry spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan said. “We have been in a war with terrorism for a while, and today the situation is exceptional.”
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Iraq Update: Jihadists Seize 2 More Iraqi Towns; Close To 30 Miles Of Baghdad; Iran Rushes To Help
Zero Hedge ^ | 06/13/2014 | Tyler Durden
Posted on 6/13/2014 12:09:18 PM by SeekAndFind
While the US scrambles to figure out what the least painful way is to admit yet another humiliating foreign policy defeat, things in Iraq continue to deteriorate as the relentless blitzkrieg unleashed by the ISIS/ISIL Al-Qaeda spin off, which has shocked everyone by its speed and scale, takes two more towns, as it rushes for its target: Baghdad itself.
As Reuters reports, "Islamist rebel fighters captured two more Iraqi towns overnight in a relentless sweep south towards the capital Baghdad in a campaign to recreate a medieval caliphate carved out of fragmenting Iraq and Syria. Thrusting further to the southeast after their lightning seizure of the major Iraqi city of Mosul in the far north and the late dictator Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, ISIL entered two towns in Diyala province bordering Iran. Saadiyah and Jalawla had fallen to the Sunni Muslim insurgents after government troops fled their positions, along with several villages around the Himreen mountains that have long been a hideout for militants, security sources said."
As the following map shows, as of this moment the Al Qaeda extremeists are now just 30 miles away from Baghdad and closing fast, although Iraqi forces may have succeded in halting the advance for now near the town of Samarra.
What the map above also shows is the extensive US presence in the region, one which however as Obama stated yesterday, he is so far unwilling to unleash on the ISIS army.
Obama said military action alone was no panacea against ISIL. He alluded to long-standing Western complaints that Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has done little to heal sectarian rifts that have left many of Iraq's minority Sunnis, cut out of power since Saddam's demise, aggrieved and keen for revenge.
"This should be also a wake-up call for the Iraqi government. There has to be a political component to this," Obama said.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden assured Maliki by telephone that Washington was prepared to intensify and accelerate its security support. The White House had signaled on Wednesday it was looking to strengthen Iraqi forces rather than meet what one U.S. official said were past Iraqi requests for air strikes.
But fears of jihadist violence spreading may increase pressure for robust international action. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said international powers "must deal with the situation".
In Mosul, ISIL staged a parade of American Humvee patrol vehicles seized from a collapsing Iraqi army in the two days since its fighters drove out of the desert and overran the city.
The parade can be seen in the clip below:
So will Baghdad fall as rapidly as all other cities in the north? For now that appears unlikely:
ISIL and its allies took control of Falluja at the start of the year. It lies just 50 km (30 miles) west of Maliki's office. ISIL has set up military councils to run the towns they captured, residents said. “'Our final destination will be Baghdad, the decisive battle will be there' - that’s what their leader kept repeating," said a regional tribal figure.
The senior U.N. official in Iraq assured the Security Council that Baghdad was in "no immediate danger". The council offered unanimous support to the government and condemned "terrorism".
As with the concurrent war in Syria, the conflict cuts across global alliances. The United States and Western and Gulf Arab allies back the mainly Sunni revolt against the Iranian-backed Syrian President Assad, but have had to watch as ISIL and other Islamists have come to dominate large parts of Syria.
Now the Shi'ite Islamic Republic of Iran, which in the 1980s fought Saddam for eight years at a time when the Sunni Iraqi leader enjoyed quiet U.S. support, may share an interest with the "Great Satan" Washington in bolstering mutual ally Maliki.
The global oil benchmark prices have jumped, as concerns mounted that the violence could disrupt supplies from a major OPEC exporter. Iraq's main oil export facilities are in the largely Shi'ite areas in the south and were "very, very safe", Oil Minister Abdul Kareem Luaibi said.
Until they aren't. As a reminder, ISIS's immediate ambition is to create an independent religious state-entity/caliphate that looks like this:
Which probably is why none other than the country's most senior Shiite cleric urged broad mobilization, telling people across the land to take arms:
A representative of Iraq's most influential Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, urged people in a sermon at Friday prayers to take up arms and defend their country from mostly Sunni insurgents.
Sheikh Abdulmehdi al-Karbalai, who was delivering the sermon at prayers in the city of Kerbala, holy to Iraq's majority Shi'ites, said those killed fighting the militants would be martyrs.
"People who are capable of carrying arms and fighting the terrorists in defence of their country... should volunteer to join the security forces to achieve this sacred goal," Karbalai said.
In response, worshippers chanted "Labbeik Ya Hussein", meaning they would act at the behest of Imam Hussein, who is buried in a shrine in Kerbala.
But what virtually assures that it is only a moment of time before the situation spirals out of control is the arrival of Iran troops who are now being sent to guard Baghdad, and fight Al Qaeda:
Reports coming out of security sources in Iran say that two battalions of Quds Force troops from the nation’s Revolutionary Guard have deployed into neighboring Iraq to guard Shi’ite holy sites as well as the capital city of Baghdad. Some have also reportedly taken part in fighting in Tikrit.
The move comes in response to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) taking most of the country’s Sunni west, and moving dangerously close to Baghdad on multiple fronts. Iraq’s Shi’ite government is on good terms with Iran.
Earlier today, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said his country can’t tolerate the growth of a terrorist group so close to their borders, and promised unspecified aid to the Maliki government.
Iran has already been aiding the Assad government in Syria against AQI’s advances there, albeit without much success. As the problem of this new AQI-run state grows, Iran is likely to try to increase support for its struggling allies, out of whose territory the state is being carved.
More from Reuters, which reports that Iran, a Shiite republic, is so alarmed by Sunni insurgent gains in Iraq that it may be willing to cooperate with Washington in helping Baghdad fight back, a senior Iranian official told Reuters. The idea is being discussed internally among the Islamic Republic's leadership, the senior Iranian official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official had no word on whether the idea had been raised with any other party.
Officials say Iran will send its neighbor advisers and weaponry, although probably not troops, to help its ally Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki check what Tehran sees as a profound threat to regional stability, officials and analysts say.
Islamist militants have captured swathes of territory including the country's second biggest city Mosul.
Tehran is open to the possibility of working with the United States to support Baghdad, the senior official said.
"We can work with Americans to end the insurgency in the Middle East," the official said, referring to events in Iraq. "We are very influential in Iraq, Syria and many other countries."
For many years, Iran has been aggrieved by what it sees as U.S. efforts to marginalize it. Tehran wants to be recognized as a significant player in regional security.
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Rouhani on Thursday strongly condemned what he called violent acts by insurgent groups in the Middle East.
“Today, in our region, unfortunately, we are witnessing violence, killing, terror and displacement," Rouhani said.
"Iran will not tolerate the terror and violence ... we will fight against terrorism, factionalism and violence.”
That's right: as a result of the epic US leftover mess in Iraq, it is now up to its arch nemesis Iran to get in and protect the country from none other than Al-Qaeda. And not only that, but Iran is prepared to work with the "great Statan", America, to defend the middle east from Al-Qaeda!
And to think: this is only the beginning.
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The sources, private contractors who have recently returned to the U.S. from Iraq, said Friday their former colleagues effectively have been abandoned by the U.S. military and are fighting for their lives against an army of jihadists surrounding the base who belong to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
The U.S. contractors are at Balad to help the Pentagon prepare the facilities for the delivery of the F-16 aircraft the Obama administration has agreed to provide the Iraqi government.
The surrounded Americans said they currently are under ISIS fire from small arms, AK47s, and rocket propelled grenades, or RPGs.
The contractors so far have been able to hold the base, but those on the scene reported it was only a matter of time before the ISIS terrorists succeed in breaking through the perimeter.
WND has learned from sources that the jihadists have closed down escape routes, and the U.S. Air Force is in a stand-down position. U.S. forces are not assisting even with air cover so a private extradition flight could land for a rescue, the sources said.
Privately scheduled exit flights have fallen through, sources said, as several private pilots originally scheduled to make the flights have quit.
The sources contend the U.S. military could provide the necessary air cover to protect C-130s or other air transport craft sufficient to make the evacuation, but so far officials have refused to get involved.
Balad Air Force Base has been under attack since Wednesday, when ISIS rebels seized the nearby town of Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein.
The attacking ISIS forces approached Balad Air Force Base in trucks and called through loudspeakers for all private security forces and Iraqi special military to leave immediately or die.
The U.S. private contractors in touch with WND reported that after hearing the broadcast, the private security forces and the Iraqi military defending the base dropped their weapons and ran.
The American contractors collected the weapons the fleeing private security forces and Iraqi military left behind and were able to hold off further immediate advances.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/06/200-u-s-contractors-surrounded-by-jihadists-in-iraq/#5wYkruoipWd0K5zv.99
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https://grabien.com/story.php?id=9873
Obama owned into oblivion in his own words
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What difference do Benghazi, Iran and Iraq make now?
Dan Miller's Blog ^ | June 13, 2014 | Dan Miller
Posted on 6/13/2014 2:28:56 PM by DanMiller
As the United States of Obama belatedly mumbles about getting slightly re-involved in the Iraq mess and Iran gets massively involved, the Benghazi clusterdunk remains relevant and should provide useful guidance for those interested in foreign policy and its consequences. Benghazi
This video by Bill Whittle explains why Benghazi still matters. Please pay close attention to the timeline presented beginning at 00:02:13.
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Video link
In the next video, the commander of the Air Force plane sent to retrieve the bodies of Ambassador Stevens, the other dead and thirty still alive Americans from Libya explains why and how Ambassador Stevens and others killed in Benghazi could have been retrieved while still alive -- had it been authorized on a timely basis. As Bill Whittle's timeline explains, there were ample time and solid intelligence during the days immediately preceding September 11th to get them out.
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Video link
We had pretty good intelligence about the Benghazi mess before, during and after its evolution. For political reasons, the Obama Administration ignored it in favor of nonsense about a "spontaneous demonstration" by Muslims rightfully outraged by a YouTube video. Has the Administration behaved in a similar fashion with respect to the Iraq mess?
Iraq
Here's the Obama Administration position on Iraq back in 2011:
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Video link
MissionAccomplished0067(Tip of the hat to Power Line.)
It would be tough for President Obama to admit that he was wrong. Despite ample opportunities, he doesn't.
LTC Allen West (U.S. Army, retired) wrote on June 13th,
Obama declared the war in Iraq over but what he failed to realize is that there is a greater war against Islamism and Iraq was just a singular theater of operations — and of course, the enemy always has a vote.
A lack of strategic vision created a vacuum and it is now being filled. Our options are truly non-existent. When Obama states, there will be no “boots on the ground,” then there cannot be any effective air strikes coordinated as part of a ground assault. The enemy can only move forward on a couple of road networks, so it would be easy to halt their advance. But Obama says he is considering a counter-terrorism fund instead. [Emphasis added.]
I have to ask, why are we denying military support to the current government of Iraq, a nation-state which we helped to form, yet we gave Islamist forces military support in Libya — and in violation of the War Powers Act?
Could it be that in “pivoting away from the Middle East” Obama intentionally sought to enable Islamist forces in the region? He sent military and materiel support to Islamists in Libya along with supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt while turning his back on combating the resurgent Islamists in Iraq — talk about confusing. [Emphasis added.]
Regardless, history will detail how America turned victory into defeat on the modern battlefield against Islamic terrorism. Iran already has its al-Quds force leader in Baghdad — signs of things to come. Iraq has become a satellite state of Iran and I don’t think they’re willing to see it fall. It’s part of their regional hegemony and would give them an extension from Iran to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon. And when we flee Afghanistan, Iran will seek to extend its regional dominance to the east — of course the Iranians will have to contend with Pakistan — who already has nukes. [Emphasis added.]
Due in large part of President Obama's premature withdrawal from Iraq, we probably did not have adequate intelligence during the period leading up to the ISIS invasion. If we didn't then we most likely still don't. This June 12th interview with General Jack Keane, former Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, provides useful insights into the new Islamic Caliphate and the current Iraq clusterdunk. We have no comprehensive regional strategy to share intelligence or otherwise.
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It should be noted that the principal ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was released in 2009 from the US-run Camp Bucca detention facility in southern Iraq.
The $10 million price [now] on his head, meanwhile, suggests that whoever released him from US custody four years ago may now be regretting it. [Insert added.]
. . . .
Well-organised and utterly ruthless, the ex-preacher is the driving force behind al-Qaeda’s resurgence throughout Syria and Iraq, putting it at the forefront of the war to topple President Bashar al-Assad and starting a fresh campaign of mayhem against the Western-backed government in Baghdad.
This week, his forces have achieved their biggest coup in Iraq to date, seizing control of government buildings in Mosul, the country's third biggest city, and marching further south to come within striking distance of the capital, Baghdad. Coming on top of similar operations in January that planted the black jihadi flag in the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi, it gives al-Qaeda control of large swathes of the north and west of the country, and poses the biggest security crisis since the US pull-out two years ago.
. . . .
[W]hen bin Laden himself was killed in May 2011, Baghdadi’s pledge to revenge his death with 100 terrorist attacks across Iraq looked like little more than bluster.
Today, he is already well past that target, thanks to a devastating campaign of car bombings and Mumbai-style killing sprees that has pushed Iraq’s death toll back up to around 1,000 per month.
“Baghdadi is actually more capable than the man he took over from,” said Dr Knights. “It’s one of those unfortunate situations where taking out the previous leadership has made things worse, not better.” [Emphasis added.]
According to this report (thus far unconfirmed elsewhere), evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has already begun. It has also been reported that Iranian forces are now in Iraq, fighting against the ISIS to help the Iraq government.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has been appealing to the White House for months for Apache helicopters and Hellfire air-ground rockets to fight terrorists. These Obama may now release, as well as considering token US drone attacks on ISIS targets in Iraq, for which he is most reluctant..
Thursday afternoon, Iran’s most powerful gun, the Al Qods Brigades chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani, arrived in Baghdad to take over the push against ISIS, in the same way as he has managed Bashar Assad’s war in Syria, and pull together the demoralized and scattered Iraqi army.
Those steps by Washington and Tehran pave the way for the US and Iran to cooperate for the first time in a joint military endeavor.
Since ISIS forces, albeit boosted by tens of thousands of armed Sunnis flocking to the black flag, are not capable of capturing Baghdad and have halted outside the city, President Obama and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have won a small space for deciding how to proceed.
Khamenei must determine whether Gen. Soleimani with the help of American weaponry can stop al Qaeda, save Maliki from collapse and prevent the fall of Baghdad, and whether it is worth sending an Iranian army division over to Iraq, our intelligence sources reported earlier Thursday. They have since entered Iraq and are fighting ISIS forces.
These moves by Tehran will determined how Washington acts in the coming hours.
President Obama is apparently going to the rescue. Sure He is:
The developments in Iraq are a stark contrast to Mr. Obama’s frequent pronouncements that al Qaeda is “on the run” and that its leadership has been decimated. In a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point three weeks ago, the president backed a policy of restraint abroad and called for an end to U.S. “military adventures.”
Mr. Obama said Thursday that the crisis in Iraq underscores his approach outlined in the West Point speech — that the U.S. should rely more on partners to fight extremism in the Middle East and in Africa.
“We’re not going to be able to be everywhere all the time,” Mr. Obama said. “But what we can do is to make sure that we are consistently helping to finance, train, advise military forces with partner countries, including Iraq, that have the capacity to maintain their own security.”
He said his proposed $5 billion “counterterrorism partnership fund” would allow the U.S. “to extend our reach without sending U.S. troops to play Whac-A-Mole wherever there ends up being a problem in a particular country.”
“That’s going to be more effective,” Mr. Obama said.
. . . .
“Certainly, we need to help stabilize the country,” Rep. Jackie Speier, California Democrat, said on MSNBC. “The extent to which we can help with airstrikes and drones with no boots on the ground, I think is a good decision. Restoring stability there is in our country’s best interests.”
The president’s options in Iraq do not include troops, said White House press secretary Jay Carney.
Iran probably thinks that the less done by the United States of Obama the better.
Iran would most likely be happy to see America leave Iraq flailing in the wind. This neatly conforms to the Islamic Republic's pre-existing narratives of American reliability. Moreover, it gives the likes of Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani, the Commander of the IRGC Quds-Force (IRGC-QF), the chance to strut his stuff. Depending on prospective levels of Iranian support to Iraq in this crisis, the maxim of Suleimani's that was popularized in The New Yorker-- "'We're not like the Americans. We don't abandon our friends'" -- may once again be proven correct. After all, a photo recently emerged on Farhang News showing him holding hands with Iraqi Parliamentarian Qassem al-Araji in Iraq.
As ISIS forces get closer to Baghdad, which may well not be invincible, the Obama Administration appears to have got in step with Iran's desires, telling Iraq to solve its own problems.
The Obama administration delivered a message Friday to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as Al Qaeda-inspired militants took control of more cities on their march toward Baghdad, reportedly leaving a trail of decapitated government forces in their wake: "Come together." [Emphasis added.]
Secretary of State John Kerry delivered the message, putting the onus on the Maliki government to "put sectarian differences aside and to come together in unity to begin to be more representative and inclusive." Republican lawmakers and military analysts are urging the administration to get more involved -- President Obama appeared to open the door Thursday to the possibility of air strikes, but no decision has been made. The president plans to make brief remarks on the situation in Iraq shortly before noon on the South Lawn.
Kerry said Friday the U.S. has "discussed a range of options including military action to provide support for the Iraqi government." He predicted "timely decisions" from the president.
The Obama Administration's position on the Israeli - Palestinian "peace process" has been similar, except that it became massively involved and sided against Israel. Perhaps Secretary Kerry will travel to Iraq and try to make his peace process --which failed in Israel and "Palestine" -- more effective there by siding with the ISIS and its friends. Unlikely, at least as long as the fighting rages.
Conlusions
The same incompetent "leader" who, for political purpose, refused to authorize a timely attempt to rescue Ambassador Stevens et al from Benghazi is now stumbling around trying -- someday -- to decide what, if anything, to do about the mess in Iraq. In all likelihood, if He ever decides what to do it will be too late. Will Iran completely displace the United States as Iraq's principal ally? It seems that she already is. The future for the entire Middle East does not look rosy as the already waning U.S. influence there approaches zero.
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NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com PRINT
June 13, 2014 12:29 PM
Obama’s Criminal Negligence in Iraq
The president didn’t end the Iraq war. He restarted it.
By Mario Loyola
President Barack Obama came to office promising to “bring a responsible end to the war in Iraq.” That should have been easy enough to do, considering the war was already over. Alas, he seems to have had in mind something quite different than “ending a war.” Perhaps because of his general bias against exertions of American power, Obama seems to have convinced himself that our continuing military presence in post-war Iraq was the same as continuing the war.
This novel conception of when wars end suggests Obama may yet pull our forces out of Europe and the Far East in order to “end” World War II. It also helps to explain how he came to equate “responsibly ending the war in Iraq” with throwing away everything we had gained from it. Obama made it plain from the start that he saw no reason to keep investing in a mistake. He let our military presence in Iraq lapse, and left the Iraqi government to fend for itself when it was still far too fragile. There is a reason we stayed in Germany and Japan and South Korea for decades after the fighting stopped: We didn’t want our sacrifices to be for nothing, and we didn’t want to have to fight again.
Now the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS — the very al-Qaeda forces we defeated in Iraq in 2007 — have come back and taken over huge swaths of the country, including most of the Sunni heartland to the west and north of Baghdad. Meanwhile, over in next-door Syria, Obama stood by while the rebels fighting Bashar Assad came under the dominance of extreme Islamist forces, and then sold them all out with the chemical-weapons deal in September 2013. Consequently, we have thrown the Iraqi government into a de facto alliance with the murderous Baathist regime in Syria — a feat that not even common enemies and a common ideology could achieve during Saddam’s rule — and now both governments find themselves increasingly dependent on Iran.
With Iran’s power and prestige thus enhanced, and rapidly filling the vacuum left behind by the U.S., the mullahs now see the possibility at long last of extending the Islamic Revolution across the Fertile Crescent. With our impending agreement to let Iran keep its nuclear-weapons programs, we can now settle comfortably into the role of a de facto subordinate ally of Iran, whose forces we may soon be helping with air strikes in Iraq. If you’re wondering where that leaves our actual allies among the Gulf kingdoms and Israel, they are wondering the same thing.
Foreign-policy mistakes are inevitable, and should generally be expected, if not always forgiven. But in its approach to Iraq and the Middle East as a whole, the Obama administration has been criminally negligent. It could be years and maybe decades before we see a situation as good as the one Obama found when he got to office — and things are almost certainly going to get far worse before they get better.
By the time he got to the White House in early 2009, Obama should have realized that the war in Iraq was already over, and that we had won. Exactly two years earlier, the Iraqi security forces were reaching critical mass, simultaneous with the start of America’s own surge, and the Sunni tribes of Anbar province were all coming over to the U.S. side. By the summer of 2007, when I was embedded in Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi forces had utterly defeated al-Qaeda’s Iraqi offshoot, ISIS, in a series of massive joint operations. The following year, the Shiite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki personally orchestrated the offensive that crushed the Iranian-backed militias collected in and around Basra in southern Iraq.
U.S. casualties in Iraq were close to levels commensurate with peacetime training activities back home, and a tenuous but real peace reigned over the whole country. Obama inherited from the Bush administration the framework agreement for a long-term alliance with Iraq, as well as a status-of-forces agreement that set December 2011 as a tentative withdrawal date for all U.S. forces. Iraqi politics were dominated by a Shiite-led coalition that overtly favored an ongoing alliance with the United States. In the press, Shiite militias accused each other of being under Iranian control.
At that point, the U.S. was exerting an enormously beneficial and calming influence on Iraqi politics. Sunnis who felt abused by the majority Shiite government could appeal to the Americans for help, while Shiites could remonstrate to the Americans about Sunni intransigence. Both could get results — peacefully — through America’s good offices. In a country where no faction trusted any of the others, all factions could trust the Americans to be impartial, for the simple reason that we were impartial. More important, to invoke the title of Bing West’s great book, we were the strongest tribe.
This central position allowed the various factions of Iraqi politics to embrace an alliance with the United States, instead of being forced to seek the protection of coreligionists in Saudi Arabia or Iran whose real agenda was the continuation of a Wahhabi-Iranian proxy war inside Iraq. This is something that Iraqis constantly commented on in their own press, but which Americans by and large never understood: In toppling the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. had opened the door to a proxy war between the Wahhabi extremists of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Arab states and the Shiite extremists of Khomeini’s revolution in Iran. That war proved far bloodier than America’s counterinsurgency campaign. In fact, the purpose of the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq was to defeat both sides in the proxy war, so that our newfound allies in the government of Iraq could cement their power and forge a lasting government.
Hence, America’s continuing military presence allowed U.S. military officers and diplomats to exert enormous influence both within Iraq and in the broader Middle East. It allowed us to keep the peace among Iraqi factions while simultaneously diminishing Iranian and Wahhabi Arab influence. We had gained, at a frightful cost in lives and treasure, a priceless strategic asset, namely the possibility of Iraq as a strong military ally, hosting U.S. forces as long as we needed to keep them there, engaged against the extremists in Syria and Iran, as well as al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and their sympathizers among the Arab states. And the prospect of a successful democracy (however rudimentary and corrupt) functioning at the heart of the Middle East gave enormous hope to the pro-democracy movements of the region. In order to consolidate those gains it was absolutely vital for the U.S. to make a long-term commitment and back it up with a long-term military presence.
So what did Obama do? He did what he normally does, which is to counteract what little capacity for action the U.S. national-security establishment retains when left on autopilot. He has visited Iraq only once during his presidency, early in 2009; but even then he only visited troops, and declined to meet with any senior Iraqi officials. He has met with Prime Minister Maliki only twice, once in December 2011 and once in November 2013, by which time the current debacle was well in train. By all accounts, Obama barely lifted a finger to preserve a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq, even when — as Dexter Filkins recently reported in a phenomenal feature for The New Yorker — all major Iraqi factions were asking, in private if not in public, for the U.S. to stay.
The tentative end-of-2011 withdrawal date became fixed, and all U.S. forces were gone by the beginning of 2012. What so many Iraqis feared would happen next did not take long to come. The Shiite factions that had rallied to the U.S. side ran for Iranian cover. Sunni tribal leaders who had thrown in their lot with the U.S. were left to fend for themselves in the face of impending and ever more certain assassination. The Iraqi government became more corrupt and authoritarian as Maliki cemented power within his own narrow coalition. The Kurds rested in their mountain redoubt behind their powerful peshmerga militia, as the Sunni heartland once again became fertile ground for ISIS and other Sunni extremists. The country began to descend once again into the Wahhabi-Iranian proxy war that Bush had ended on America’s terms in the final years of his presidency.
Meanwhile, on Syria, Americans quickly agreed, on a broad bipartisan basis, to make the worst of a bad situation. As soon as the rebellion began, there were those, including here at NR, who took the attitude that there were no moderate Sunni rebels in the Syrian resistance, and that we should just let our enemies in Syria (namely everyone) pulverize each other in the hopes they would all lose. In fact, the resistance included plenty of people willing to align themselves with the U.S., namely the very same tribes that had aligned themselves with the U.S. in Iraq.
The civil war in Syria would inevitably threaten the stability of Iraq, and potentially turn into a cataclysmic regional conflict. Hence, opponents of intervention in Syria should have realized that the only alternative to intervening in Syria was to send U.S. forces back into Iraq, in order to seal off the Iraq–Syria border and buttress the Iraqi security forces.
But instead of coopting the Syrian resistance, or — the next best thing — sealing the border between Syria and Iraq, we did nothing. By the start of 2013 we had abandoned both the Sunni resistance in Syria and the Sunni heartland in Iraq to Islamist networks, particularly ISIS. The Syrian civil war’s slide across the border into Iraq rapidly became a reality. Violence increased throughout the year until Maliki came begging for American help in November 2013. But Obama hadn’t done anything to stop the region from sliding back into chaos and there was no point in starting now. Maliki left empty-handed, with little choice but to throw himself at the mercy of the Iranians — and hope for survival in a revival of the Wahhabi-Iranian proxy war.
When Obama got to power, a tenuous peace held in the Middle East, and the U.S. stood at the height of its influence and prestige in the region. Of course, the Middle East is a devilishly tricky place; upheaval is always around the corner; and the U.S. can’t single-handedly control any region. But it should be obvious to anyone who takes an honest look at the events of the last five years that the Obama administration’s whole approach to foreign policy was bound to make the Middle East a much more dangerous place.
Obama’s skepticism of American power apparently blinded him to how vital that power was to the maintenance of peace and stability. Perhaps this discomfort with American power meant the gains of the Iraq war were a burden to him. If so, he couldn’t do anything to reverse the 4,500 lives we lost and $1 trillion we spent to liberate Iraq. But maybe he could make people stop saying the sacrifice had been worth it.
If that was his purpose, then there is at least one area in which his foreign policy is succeeding. As for the rest, behold the Middle East in flames.
— Mario Loyola is former special assistant at the Pentagon and former counsel for foreign and defense policy to the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee
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U.S. companies pulling contractors from Iraqi bases as security crumbles
WaPo ^ | 6/12/2014 | Dan Lamothe
Posted on 6/13/2014 3:15:45 PM by mojito
The crisis in Iraq has prompted U.S. contractors with personnel there to evacuate them from areas near Baghdad that are increasingly in the line of fire as insurgent fighters capture more territory with the apparent end goal of seizing the Iraqi capital.
The individuals are being “temporarily relocated by their companies due to security concerns in the area,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement Thursday evening. The individuals involved include U.S. citizens who are currently working under contract with Iraq’s central government in support of the Pentagon’s foreign weapons sales program.
[....]
On Thursday, the electronics giant Siemens was working to get about 50 employees out of Baiji, Cruz said. It was not clear exactly what their operation there entails, but the company announced in February that it had signed a deal to provide service and maintenance to a large gas power plant there. The oil refinery city is some 130 miles north of Baghdad.
Cruz said that her firm has recommended using teams of U.S. and Kurdish private security firms to evacuate the contractors because the semi-autonomous Kurdish government in Iraq’s north had sent its security forces known as pesh merga to take control of the city of Kirkuk after Iraqi security forces abandoned their bases and equipment and fled. The Kurdish forces now control roads in the region.
Negotiations were ongoing to secure the safety of foreign personnel in Baiji and to get them out of harm’s way. U.S. security contractors involved reported that they engaged in gunfire to get through the region, Cruz said.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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How al-Qaeda Terrorized Its Way Back in Iraq
World Affairs Journal ^ | January 5, 2014 | Max Boot
Posted on 6/13/2014 3:39:37 PM by robowombat
How al-Qaeda Terrorized Its Way Back in Iraq Author: Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies January 5, 2014
The climactic battles of the American War in Iraq were fought in Anbar Province, with U.S. forces at great cost retaking the city of Fallujah at the end of 2004 and Ramadi, the provincial capital, in 2006-07. The latter success was sparked by an unlikely alliance with tribal fighters that turned around what had been a losing war effort and made possible the success of what became known as "the surge." By 2009, violence had fallen more than 90%, creating an unexpected opportunity to build a stable, democratic and prosperous country in the heart of the Middle East.
It is now obvious that this opportunity has been squandered, with tragic consequences for the entire region. In recent days the Iraqi army appears to have been pushed, at least temporarily, out of Fallujah and Ramadi by al Qaeda in Iraq militants. A battle is raging for control of Anbar Province with some tribal fighters supporting the government and others AQI. Mosul, the major city of northern Iraq and a longtime hotbed of AQI activity, could be next to fall. If it does, AQI would gain effective control of the Sunni Triangle, an area north and west of Baghdad the size of New England.
AQI's control would stretch beyond the Sunni Triangle because its offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, dominates a significant portion of Syrian territory across the border. This creates the potential for a new nightmare: an al Qaeda state incorporating northern Syria and western Iraq.
Even if this worst-case scenario does not come to pass—even if Mosul holds and even if the Iraqi army succeeds in regaining control of Ramadi and Fallujah—the odds of Iraq becoming embroiled, like Syria, in a full-blown civil war are growing by the day. Iraq is almost there already: The United Nations reports that last year 8,868 Iraqis were killed, the highest death toll since the dark days of 2008. Car bombings have become such a regular occurrence that they barely make the news.
What happened? How did Iraq go from relatively good to god-awful in the last two years?
The chief culprit is al Qaeda, which has shown a disturbing but nevertheless impressive ability to bounce back from near-defeat. But it would never have been able to do so if it did not enjoy significant support among the Sunni population of Anbar, Ninewah, Diyala and other provinces. When the group lost that support in 2007, AQI's operatives were quickly rolled up. Today it enjoys freedom to maneuver because it has the backing of many Sunnis who now see it as a defender against a predatory, sectarian Shiite government.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has no one but himself to blame. If he had embraced the Sunni Awakening movement, Iraq likely would have remained relatively peaceful. Instead, the moment that U.S. troops left Iraq, he immediately began victimizing prominent Sunnis.
In December 2011 Mr. Maliki sent his security forces to arrest Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, who escaped but was sentenced to death in absentia based on the testimony of his bodyguards, allegedly extracted under torture. In December 2012, security forces arrested the bodyguards of Raffi al-Essawi, a former finance minister, and other leading Sunni politicians. Mr. Essawi narrowly missed winding up in prison. Another prominent Sunni parliamentarian, Ahmed al-Awlani, was arrested just a few days ago, on Dec. 28, after a gunfight between his bodyguards and Iraqi security forces that left his brother dead.
Mr. Awlani's arrest set off the events that culminated in al Qaeda fighters, dressed in black, parading through the streets of Fallujah and Ramadi. Mr. Maliki reacted to protests over Mr. Awlani's detention by sending his security forces to close down a protest camp in Ramadi. This sparked major fighting, with many Sunni leaders in Anbar urging their followers to resist government troops under the orders of a Shiite regime. Sheikh Abdul Malek al Saadi's message, translated by the Institute for the Study of War, was typical: "Oh heroes of Fallujah and other towns. Cut the road and prevent Maliki's troops from reaching your brothers in the heart of Anbar. Maliki wants to wipe out every one of the people he dislikes, using the antiterrorism pretext again."
Not all is necessarily lost. While some Anbar sheiks have cast their lot with AQI, others continue to side with the government and cooperate with local police, if not with the Iraqi army. Most prominent has been Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, one of the Sunni Awakening leaders. On Jan. 1 he called on his followers to fight against AQI's attempts "to commit their crimes, to cut off the heads, blow up houses, kill scholars and disrupt life."
Iraq may once again stumble back from the brink of all-out civil war. But it is unlikely to recover the promise of 2009-11—in retrospect, a mini-golden age—because Mr. Maliki is unlikely to mend his ways.
What Iraq needs now is what it saw in 2007 when Gen. David Petraeus orchestrated a full-blown counterinsurgency strategy. Such a strategy has many facets, but one of the most important is a political "line of operations," which in this case means fostering reconciliation between the prime minister and tribal leaders of Anbar.
The U.S. lost most of its leverage to do that when it foolishly pulled its troops out of Iraq at the end of 2011 after the failure of halfhearted negotiations overseen by Vice President Joe Biden. Selling Iraq Hellfire missiles, as the Obama administration has just done, is a poor substitute. It is positively destructive because it only further inflames the situation and creates the impression that the Americans are siding with militant Shiites in a sectarian civil war.
Washington should make clear that military and intelligence help, which Baghdad has requested, will be forthcoming only if Mr. Maliki extends an open hand, rather than a clenched fist, to his country's Sunnis.
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both sides are retards, we could NEVER have ''won'' no matter how many billions we pissed away there in the next decade
should have never gone in, or at least never disarmed the Baathists
It's such a surprise that the Freedom Fighters Obama and McCain armed in Syria are using those weapons in Iraq ::)
BTW wasn't it just a day or 2 ago that the Obama fanboys here were saying Al Qaeda was no longer a threat?
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American Enterprise Institute ^ | 6/13/14 | Marc Thiessen
Posted on June 13, 2014 at 7:45:13 PM EDT by Nachum
In 2007, President George W. Bush warned that if America withdrew prematurely from Iraq, American troops would eventually have to return: To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are ready … would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda. It would mean that we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we’d allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is
(Excerpt) Read more at aei-ideas.org ...
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American Enterprise Institute ^ | 6/13/14 | Marc Thiessen
Posted on June 13, 2014 at 7:45:13 PM EDT by Nachum
In 2007, President George W. Bush warned that if America withdrew prematurely from Iraq, American troops would eventually have to return: To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are ready … would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda. It would mean that we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we’d allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is
(Excerpt) Read more at aei-ideas.org ...
ISIS Leader to USA: ‘Soon We Will be in Direct Confrontation’
CNS ^ | 6/13/14 | Terence P. Jeffrey
Posted on June 14, 2014 at 11:35:28 AM EDT by Baynative
(CNSNews.com) - Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), issued a rare audio message back on January 21 in which he flatly stated his group’s intention to march on Baghdad and move into “direct confrontation” with the United States.
“Our last message is to the Americans. Soon we will be in direct confrontation, and the sons of Islam have prepared for such a day,” Baghdadi said. “So watch, for we are with you, watching.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
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Obama’s Wish-Fulfilling Prophecy in Iraq
Robert Tracinski
By Robert Tracinski
June 13, 2014
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Democrats predicted that the war in Iraq was unwinnable, Harry Reid said it was already lost, and Senator Obama declared that President Bush’s “surge” wouldn’t work.
And now here we are in 2014, and by golly it looks as if they were right: Iraq is a total disaster. An al-Qaeda splinter group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, overran Fallujah months ago and just knocked over Mosul and Tikrit, reportedly executing hundreds in the street and sending half a million Iraqis fleeing for their lives. They’re on a path that will take them straight into Baghdad, if there is no one to stop them. And the Iraqi army is in disarray.
So were the Democrats right? Was Iraq a lost cause, inevitably, all along? There’s one big problem with this narrative: Iraq has fallen apart on President Obama’s watch, as a consequence of his own policy of willful neglect.
I would say that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that doesn’t quite seem to cover it. Instead, I would characterize this as a wish-fulfilling prophecy. If Iraq is falling to al-Qaeda, it’s because this administration deliberately chose to throw away the victory handed to them by George W. Bush. The left thought we should have lost the war in Iraq, they wanted us to lose it—and finally they’re getting the outcome they wanted.
To grasp the magnitude of this betrayal, we need to go back to the state of play in Iraq in 2009 and trace the steps forward to understand how we got here.
By 2009, the surge had wiped out al-Qaeda in Iraq, taking advantage of the Islamist fanatics’ brutal tactics to drive a wedge between the terrorists and their local allies. Seizing on this opportunity, the US served as the middleman for a political settlement between the Shiite government and the Sunni tribes in the insurgent heartland, who agreed to oppose the insurgency and back the central government. We then goaded Nouri al-Maliki’s government into clearing out an Iranian-backed, theocratic Shiite militia in Baghdad and in Iraq’s south. So Obama inherited the legacy of a counter-insurgency campaign that had succeeded beyond its advocates’ most ardent hopes. (I know. I was one of the advocates.)
Then, in early 2010, Iraq held an election that produced pretty much the result we had hoped for: a victory for Ayad Allawi’s non-sectarian, anti-Iranian Sunni-Shiite coalition. In effect, this was a ratification of the settlement between the country’s sectarian factions.
But Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had been a reluctant and unreliable ally, resisted the election result, refused to allow the formation of a new government, and disqualified a batch of Allawi’s candidates after the fact, essentially overturning the election result. And what did we do? We let him. Obama’s State Department signed off on what we can now recognize as their favorite kind of agreement: an off-ramp deal, i.e., a deal designed, not to solve the crisis, but to come up with a face-saving way of absolving us of any responsibility for it. So we brokered a deal where Maliki was supposed to share power with Allawi’s coalition, and Maliki never really bothered to live up to it. Instead, he followed up with a campaign of sectarian persecution and political suppression against the Sunnis.
But what were we going to do about it? President Obama had also failed to negotiate an agreement to keep 10,000 US troops in Iraq. The only message he was sending to Baghdad was that he wanted to wash his hands of Iraq as soon as a possible. So he had no political leverage to use with Maliki.
The results was predictable, and a lot of us predicted it: having broken the political settlement, Maliki alienated the Sunnis, caused them to conclude that they had no stake in the government’s survival, and made them open to the return of the insurgents.
But the key turning point was the rebuilding of al-Qaeda in Syria. When Syrians first rose up against Bashar al-Assad, it was obvious that we couldn’t back the regime, a brutal dictatorship that was closely allied to Iran and had vigorously backed the insurgency in Iraq. But President Obama refused to take any significant action to back the rebellion, which was largely non-sectarian in its early days. This left a power vacuum that would be filled by Sunni Islamists. Yet the administration still kept stringing along the non-Islamist rebels, leaving them some hope that if they opposed al-Qaeda and declared a non-sectarian agenda, we might tip the scales in their favor.
And then came the Putin-brokered deal last summer in which Assad agreed to begin maybe dismantling some of his chemical weapons, in exchange for being accepted as the indispensible man in Damascus. It was another off-ramp deal designed to take the issue off the president’s plate. This betrayal crushed the hopes of the non-Islamist rebels and gave a huge boost in credibility to the Islamists. It helped create a whole new arena for al-Qaeda to reconstitute itself—which naturally crossed over the border. Notice who’s taking over in Iraq: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
None of this just happened out of the blue in the past few weeks. All of this has happened slowly, agonizingly, over a period of five years. There was plenty of time to notice what was going on—some of us were pointing at the unfolding disaster and jumping up and down and screaming—and to do something about it.
To stop it now would require a giant new military effort, which is vanishingly unlikely to happen unless—until—this disaster comes home to our doorstep in some spectacular way. But to stop it along the way would not have required much, if any, direct military force. It would have meant keeping a few tens of thousand of trainers, advisors, and special forces in Iraq to support the government and back up our influence, plus a whole lot of vigorous diplomacy. But the hallmark of this administration is that they came in talking a lot about how they preferred diplomacy to military action—and then showed virtually no interest in accomplishing anything with diplomacy.
All of this happened while Barack Obama was president—and, I should add, most of it unfolded while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. Yet if anyone in the administration was raising alarms, neither the president nor Madame Secretary deigned to listen.
So if Iraq is collapsing, we have to assume that this is a result the administration was happy to accept, because they never lifted a finger to stop it.
Even now, Nouri al-Maliki is asking us to come in with air strikes, though at this point, he’s really just asking us to intervene on his behalf in a sectarian civil war. That might be the least bad option, but it’s not clear we’ll even do that. So what is Maliki left to do? Turn to Iran for the help we won’t offer.
President Obama is shaping Iraq on the model of his Syria policy: letting it turn into an endless battle between two gangs of theocrats: the Sunni al-Qaeda gang versus the Shiite Iranian gang. That’s his vision of the Middle East: a cauldron of competing Islamist terror gangs.
In purely humanitarian terms, this is a catastrophe. The administration is callously condemning tens of millions of people in the Middle East to poverty, terror, murder, torture, and starvation. And all for what? To flip a big middle finger to George W. Bush?
It’s also a disaster for our interests. In Obama’s Middle East, terror is the coin of the realm, power goes to the most brutal and fanatical, and the whole region becomes one giant live-fire training camp for jihadists from around the globe. I fear we’re going to be paying for this disaster for a long, long time.
Only one thing could be worse. The Middle East could become a cauldron of nuclear-armed Islamist factions. That comes next, when Iran decides to push for a bomb and the Sunni Gulf states decide it’s time to match them. All of this looks like a geopolitical nightmare for us, though it might well achieve another key administration goal: jacking up the price of gasoline to the $8 per gallon that Energy Secretary Steven Chu once named as his target.
Chalk this down to politics, with Obama wanting to focus on domestic issues and avoid any of the entanglements of foreign policy—though he hasn’t been very successful at either of those goals. Chalk it down to crass partisanship, with Democrats giving off the sense that don’t want any American victory if it’s tainted by association with George W. Bush. But I think there’s something deeper at work.
Consider the post-counter-culture left’s attitude toward all our wars, starting with what they did in Vietnam.
By 1973, we had withdrawn ground troops from Vietnam and left a government that could survive, with significant aid and support from the US. So the left systematically cut off all of that aid, inviting North Vietnam to take over. The results were pretty similar to today, with lawless militants imposing a reign of terror and creating vast humanitarian disasters in the places we had abandoned. The left turned an honorable withdrawal into a humiliating defeat, which then emboldened the Soviets to go on a global romp, swallowing more bits of Latin America and grabbing Afghanistan.
Similarly, when things were at their worst during George Bush’s prosecution of the war in Iraq—the “worst,” then, was far better than it is now—Democrats like Joe Biden and Barack Obama didn’t offer their advice on how to rally the war effort and win. Bush had to do that on his own. No, they held a series of votes in Congress trying to guarantee defeat by cutting off funding for the war, just as congressional Democrats had done with Vietnam.
In the left’s view, America is an oppressive and illegitimate society, founded on lies and racism. Until we can be fundamentally transformed, we deserve to lose. And if we don’t lose on our own, they will do what they can to induce that result.
That’s the wish-fulfilling prophecy. We’re losing in Iraq because the people who are now in charge of our policy always said that we would lose, always thought that we should lose, always tried to make us lose, and now they get to make it happen.
This is a generational lesson. If the failed rollout of ObamaCare was a reminder of why we can never let the left have power over the economy, the current disaster in the Middle East is a reminder of why we can never let the left have control over our foreign policy.
We learned all that, once upon a time, back in the 1970s, but the lesson wore off. Let’s learn it for good this time.
Follow Robert on Twitter.
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I don't give a shit if Iraq falls....its not our problem and it was stable until Bush had the novel idea to invade for "weapons of mass destruction".
However, Obama did the right thing by refusing to send troops because its forced Iraq to grow some balls. The Ayatollah spoke and now you got about 200,000 armed and crazy civilians rushing out to confront them and beat their asses into the ground....they even got the little kids armed and stated that once they capture the insurgents that they are going to chop off all of their heads.
Let them have a go at it....that's what the US soldiers have been saying all along
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And as usual the leftist ignore the fact that their messiah was wrong again in his assesment of the situation in Iraq. Much like he was wrong about Russia.
They seem to ignore a very important trend here. That the crapinthewhitehouse doesn't know what he is doing or what he is talking about when it comes to foreign relations.
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And as usual the leftist ignore the fact that their messiah was wrong again in his assesment of the situation in Iraq. Much like he was wrong about Russia.
They seem to ignore a very important trend here. That the crapinthewhitehouse doesn't know what he is doing or what he is talking about when it comes to foreign relations.
We got 2 aircraft carriers parked outside of Iraq and plenty of fighter jets. Let the Iraqi citizens do the ground work because the minute they start beating some ass and cutting off some heads, those insurgents will disappear. They'll only mess with people who won't fight back
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I don't give a shit if Iraq falls....its not our problem and it was stable until Bush had the novel idea to invade for "weapons of mass destruction".
However, Obama did the right thing by refusing to send troops because its forced Iraq to grow some balls. The Ayatollah spoke and now you got about 200,000 armed and crazy civilians rushing out to confront them and beat their asses into the ground....they even got the little kids armed and stated that once they capture the insurgents that they are going to chop off all of their heads.
Let them have a go at it....that's what the US soldiers have been saying all along
The resident dumbass speaks.......
Just fuck it right, all the lives lost, just pack it up and let it all be for nothing ::), but as long as you can assign blame to Bush its all good.
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The resident dumbass speaks.......
Just fuck it right, all the lives lost, just pack it up and let it all be for nothing ::), but as long as you can assign blame to Bush its all good.
So we should continue to die for their country???? Fuck that shit. They were told to grow a pair and they finally grew some....the minute they chop some heads off and beat some ass, the better they will be off.
In school, the bully always picks on kids that he knows won't fight back.
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So we should continue to die for their country???? Fuck that shit. They were told to grow a pair and they finally grew some....the minute they chop some heads off and beat some ass, the better they will be off.
In school, the bully always picks on kids that he knows won't fight back.
maybe O-twink should go show them some muscle and how its done right?
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The resident dumbass speaks.......
Just fuck it right, all the lives lost, just pack it up and let it all be for nothing ::), but as long as you can assign blame to Bush its all good.
As far as i am concerned BUSH is to blame for most of this.
He led the charge to invade.
He led it based on cherry picked intel and war fever
He allowed the worse post invasion plan in history
The place was far better off with Saddam.
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As far as i am concerned BUSH is to blame for most of this.
He led the charge to invade.
He led it based on cherry picked intel and war fever
He allowed the worse post invasion plan in history
The place was far better off with Saddam.
Bullshit - the country was stablilized for years while we had some type of prescence there. Obama has been president who what 6 years now? Obama said he knew how to deal with this better than W and the results speak for themselves.
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Bullshit - the country was stablilized for years while we had some type of prescence there. Obama has been president who what 6 years now? Obama said he knew how to deal with this better than W and the results speak for themselves.
Nope.
We should have never went in there. And when we did we fucked it up.
OB got handed a turd.
And then, the only real way to make sure things would have been stable there was to keep troops there, which OB shouldn't and didn't do.
Hence: mostly Bush to blame.
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Nope.
We should have never went in there. And when we did we fucked it up.
OB got handed a turd.
And then, the only real way to make sure things would have been stable there was to keep troops there, which OB shouldn't and didn't do.
Hence: mostly Bush to blame.
Whether we should or should not have been there is meaningless. a true leader accepts the situation and improves it - Obama made it worse, far worse. In 2008-2009 Iraq was not in turmoil even close to what we see now that Obama has gotten his policies implemented. Remember - he ran on this and the results speak for itself.
You voted for him 2x and he failed miserable. Own up to it already
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Whether we should or should not have been there is meaningless. a true leader accepts the situation and improves it - Obama made it worse, far worse. In 2008-2009 Iraq was not in turmoil even close to what we see now that Obama has gotten his policies implemented. Remember - he ran on this and the results speak for itself.
You voted for him 2x and he failed miserable. Own up to it already
Doesn't matter.
If i ram a truck into a nuclear power plant causing a melt down and spend the next 5 years trying to fix something that will not be fixed and then someone else takes over, seals it up the best they can, but a few years later it starts leaking again, doesn't put that person in fault. the person who crash the truck is still to blame.
OB couldn't and shouldn't have left troops in there. On top of that, after it NOT being about WMD's, and then being about "democracy" we needed to leave and them deal with it.
Which brings us to the point: We should have never crashed our truck in there to begin with.
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Doesn't matter.
Which brings us to the point: We should have never crashed our truck in there to begin with.
So you must really hate Hillary and Biden for voting in favor of the invasion.
I am sure that based on that you won't vote for Hitlery or Biden. Right? ::)
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So you must really have Hillary and Biden for voting in favor of the invasion.
I am sure that based on that you won't vote for Hitlery or Biden. Right? ::)
Not at all.
I was against it when it happened. Wasn't a supporter of Hilly or Biden then or now.
It's easy to see why all those dems voted for it. To not vote for it would have been political suicide with the war fever in this country at the time.
You know someday Dario, you'll wake up and see that the whole dem vs rep thing is more of a puppet show.
We should have never invaded Iraq, even if we did find WMD's. Anybody with even a little bit of intelligence could see that big picture.
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Not at all.
I was against it when it happened. Wasn't a supporter of Hilly or Biden then or now.
It's easy to see why all those dems voted for it. To not vote for it would have been political suicide with the war fever in this country at the time.
You know someday Dario, you'll wake up and see that the whole dem vs rep thing is more of a puppet show.
We should have never invaded Iraq, even if we did find WMD's. Anybody with even a little bit of intelligence could see that big picture.
That was 10 years ago. Obama promised that if we followed his plan things would get better. You voted for him based on those promises. Things are drastically worse now that he has gotten his way.
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That was 10 years ago. Obama promised that if we followed his plan things would get better. You voted for him based on those promises. Things are drastically worse now that he has gotten his way.
I didn't vote for him, most people didn't vote for him for those promises, most people voted against McCain as well as Romney (both turds)
Bush got us into the mess.
If i take a Machete and hack your arm off and 5 years latter its still bleeding because it can never be stopped unless you keep a doctor there all the time
are you going to blame the doctor for you bleeding stump or me?
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I didn't vote for him, most people didn't vote for him for those promises, most people voted against McCain as well as Romney (both turds)
Bush got us into the mess.
If i take a Machete and hack your arm off and 5 years latter its still bleeding because it can never be stopped unless you keep a doctor there all the time
are you going to blame the doctor for you bleeding stump or me?
Straw Man argument as Obama ran on things getting BETTER if we followed his plan.
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Straw Man argument as Obama ran on things getting BETTER if we followed his plan.
Look, that piece of shit, arrogant, wanna be president fuck face, is at fault for a great many things.
But not Iraq. That "mostly" falls on Bush.
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Look, that piece of shit, arrogant, wanna be president fuck face, is at fault for a great many things.
But not Iraq. That "mostly" falls on Bush.
I think that he ran on an anti war platform , however, the facts on the ground should have made him more responsible and realize that just pulling out on a dime like that was guaranteed to result in what has happened. He was too afraid to piss off his radical base in 2012 and now we see the results.
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Revealed: How Obama SET FREE the merciless terrorist warlord now leading the ISIS (short)
MailOnline ^ | Published: 10:55 EST, 13 June 2014 | Updated: 14:20 EST, 13 June 2014 Read more: http://www.dailym | By Francesca Chambers
Posted on 6/16/2014 12:27:11 PM by F15Eagle
Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in custody at a detention facility in Iraq, but president Barack Obama let him go, it was revealed on Friday.
Al Baghdadi was among the prisoners released in 2009 from the U.S.'s now-closed Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr in Iraq.
But now five years later he is leading the army of ruthless extremists bearing down on Baghdad who want to turn the country into an Islamist state by blazing a bloody trail through towns and cities, executing Iraqi soldiers, beheading police officers and gunning down innocent civilians.
It is unclear why the U.S. let the merciless al Qaeda leader slip away, however, one theory proposed by The Telegraph is that al Baghadadi was granted amnesty along with thousands of other detainees because the U.S. was preparing to pull out of Iraq.
The United States began withdrawing troops from Iraq in 2010,and Camp Bucca closed in 2011 along with the United States' other military facilities as President Obama declared that the War in Iraq had come to an end.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
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I think that he ran on an anti war platform , however, the facts on the ground should have made him more responsible and realize that just pulling out on a dime like that was guaranteed to result in what has happened. He was too afraid to piss off his radical base in 2012 and now we see the results.
He didn't pull out on a dime. It took over 2 years.
Additionally, we couldn't afford to be there any longer, they didn't want us there, and american citizens wanted our troops to come home.
Crazy, though, 5 years after "Mission Accomplished".
Do you think we should have stayed?
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Bullshit - the country was stablilized for years while we had some type of prescence there. Obama has been president who what 6 years now? Obama said he knew how to deal with this better than W and the results speak for themselves.
I agree with this.
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That was 10 years ago. Obama promised that if we followed his plan things would get better. You voted for him based on those promises. Things are drastically worse now that he has gotten his way.
Leftists made it look like he could improve relations between us and mooslims because at some point he had read the Koran or some other crap reason they came up with.
It must be painful for all those delusional, low information voters to realize that their messiah is a fraud. However, that won't keep them from repeating the same mistake by voting for Hitlery.
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What difference do Benghazi, Iran and Iraq make now?
Dan Miller's Blog ^ | June 13, 2014 | Dan Miller
Posted on 6/13/2014 2:28:56 PM by DanMiller
As the United States of Obama belatedly mumbles about getting slightly re-involved in the Iraq mess and Iran gets massively involved, the Benghazi clusterdunk remains relevant and should provide useful guidance for those interested in foreign policy and its consequences. Benghazi
This video by Bill Whittle explains why Benghazi still matters. Please pay close attention to the timeline presented beginning at 00:02:13.
]
Video link
In the next video, the commander of the Air Force plane sent to retrieve the bodies of Ambassador Stevens, the other dead and thirty still alive Americans from Libya explains why and how Ambassador Stevens and others killed in Benghazi could have been retrieved while still alive -- had it been authorized on a timely basis. As Bill Whittle's timeline explains, there were ample time and solid intelligence during the days immediately preceding September 11th to get them out.
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Video link
We had pretty good intelligence about the Benghazi mess before, during and after its evolution. For political reasons, the Obama Administration ignored it in favor of nonsense about a "spontaneous demonstration" by Muslims rightfully outraged by a YouTube video. Has the Administration behaved in a similar fashion with respect to the Iraq mess?
Iraq
Here's the Obama Administration position on Iraq back in 2011:
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Video link
MissionAccomplished0067(Tip of the hat to Power Line.)
It would be tough for President Obama to admit that he was wrong. Despite ample opportunities, he doesn't.
LTC Allen West (U.S. Army, retired) wrote on June 13th,
Obama declared the war in Iraq over but what he failed to realize is that there is a greater war against Islamism and Iraq was just a singular theater of operations — and of course, the enemy always has a vote.
A lack of strategic vision created a vacuum and it is now being filled. Our options are truly non-existent. When Obama states, there will be no “boots on the ground,” then there cannot be any effective air strikes coordinated as part of a ground assault. The enemy can only move forward on a couple of road networks, so it would be easy to halt their advance. But Obama says he is considering a counter-terrorism fund instead. [Emphasis added.]
I have to ask, why are we denying military support to the current government of Iraq, a nation-state which we helped to form, yet we gave Islamist forces military support in Libya — and in violation of the War Powers Act?
Could it be that in “pivoting away from the Middle East” Obama intentionally sought to enable Islamist forces in the region? He sent military and materiel support to Islamists in Libya along with supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt while turning his back on combating the resurgent Islamists in Iraq — talk about confusing. [Emphasis added.]
Regardless, history will detail how America turned victory into defeat on the modern battlefield against Islamic terrorism. Iran already has its al-Quds force leader in Baghdad — signs of things to come. Iraq has become a satellite state of Iran and I don’t think they’re willing to see it fall. It’s part of their regional hegemony and would give them an extension from Iran to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon. And when we flee Afghanistan, Iran will seek to extend its regional dominance to the east — of course the Iranians will have to contend with Pakistan — who already has nukes. [Emphasis added.]
Due in large part of President Obama's premature withdrawal from Iraq, we probably did not have adequate intelligence during the period leading up to the ISIS invasion. If we didn't then we most likely still don't. This June 12th interview with General Jack Keane, former Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, provides useful insights into the new Islamic Caliphate and the current Iraq clusterdunk. We have no comprehensive regional strategy to share intelligence or otherwise.
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It should be noted that the principal ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was released in 2009 from the US-run Camp Bucca detention facility in southern Iraq.
The $10 million price [now] on his head, meanwhile, suggests that whoever released him from US custody four years ago may now be regretting it. [Insert added.]
. . . .
Well-organised and utterly ruthless, the ex-preacher is the driving force behind al-Qaeda’s resurgence throughout Syria and Iraq, putting it at the forefront of the war to topple President Bashar al-Assad and starting a fresh campaign of mayhem against the Western-backed government in Baghdad.
This week, his forces have achieved their biggest coup in Iraq to date, seizing control of government buildings in Mosul, the country's third biggest city, and marching further south to come within striking distance of the capital, Baghdad. Coming on top of similar operations in January that planted the black jihadi flag in the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi, it gives al-Qaeda control of large swathes of the north and west of the country, and poses the biggest security crisis since the US pull-out two years ago.
. . . .
[W]hen bin Laden himself was killed in May 2011, Baghdadi’s pledge to revenge his death with 100 terrorist attacks across Iraq looked like little more than bluster.
Today, he is already well past that target, thanks to a devastating campaign of car bombings and Mumbai-style killing sprees that has pushed Iraq’s death toll back up to around 1,000 per month.
“Baghdadi is actually more capable than the man he took over from,” said Dr Knights. “It’s one of those unfortunate situations where taking out the previous leadership has made things worse, not better.” [Emphasis added.]
According to this report (thus far unconfirmed elsewhere), evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has already begun. It has also been reported that Iranian forces are now in Iraq, fighting against the ISIS to help the Iraq government.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has been appealing to the White House for months for Apache helicopters and Hellfire air-ground rockets to fight terrorists. These Obama may now release, as well as considering token US drone attacks on ISIS targets in Iraq, for which he is most reluctant..
Thursday afternoon, Iran’s most powerful gun, the Al Qods Brigades chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani, arrived in Baghdad to take over the push against ISIS, in the same way as he has managed Bashar Assad’s war in Syria, and pull together the demoralized and scattered Iraqi army.
Those steps by Washington and Tehran pave the way for the US and Iran to cooperate for the first time in a joint military endeavor.
Since ISIS forces, albeit boosted by tens of thousands of armed Sunnis flocking to the black flag, are not capable of capturing Baghdad and have halted outside the city, President Obama and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have won a small space for deciding how to proceed.
Khamenei must determine whether Gen. Soleimani with the help of American weaponry can stop al Qaeda, save Maliki from collapse and prevent the fall of Baghdad, and whether it is worth sending an Iranian army division over to Iraq, our intelligence sources reported earlier Thursday. They have since entered Iraq and are fighting ISIS forces.
These moves by Tehran will determined how Washington acts in the coming hours.
President Obama is apparently going to the rescue. Sure He is:
The developments in Iraq are a stark contrast to Mr. Obama’s frequent pronouncements that al Qaeda is “on the run” and that its leadership has been decimated. In a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point three weeks ago, the president backed a policy of restraint abroad and called for an end to U.S. “military adventures.”
Mr. Obama said Thursday that the crisis in Iraq underscores his approach outlined in the West Point speech — that the U.S. should rely more on partners to fight extremism in the Middle East and in Africa.
“We’re not going to be able to be everywhere all the time,” Mr. Obama said. “But what we can do is to make sure that we are consistently helping to finance, train, advise military forces with partner countries, including Iraq, that have the capacity to maintain their own security.”
He said his proposed $5 billion “counterterrorism partnership fund” would allow the U.S. “to extend our reach without sending U.S. troops to play Whac-A-Mole wherever there ends up being a problem in a particular country.”
“That’s going to be more effective,” Mr. Obama said.
. . . .
“Certainly, we need to help stabilize the country,” Rep. Jackie Speier, California Democrat, said on MSNBC. “The extent to which we can help with airstrikes and drones with no boots on the ground, I think is a good decision. Restoring stability there is in our country’s best interests.”
The president’s options in Iraq do not include troops, said White House press secretary Jay Carney.
Iran probably thinks that the less done by the United States of Obama the better.
Iran would most likely be happy to see America leave Iraq flailing in the wind. This neatly conforms to the Islamic Republic's pre-existing narratives of American reliability. Moreover, it gives the likes of Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani, the Commander of the IRGC Quds-Force (IRGC-QF), the chance to strut his stuff. Depending on prospective levels of Iranian support to Iraq in this crisis, the maxim of Suleimani's that was popularized in The New Yorker-- "'We're not like the Americans. We don't abandon our friends'" -- may once again be proven correct. After all, a photo recently emerged on Farhang News showing him holding hands with Iraqi Parliamentarian Qassem al-Araji in Iraq.
As ISIS forces get closer to Baghdad, which may well not be invincible, the Obama Administration appears to have got in step with Iran's desires, telling Iraq to solve its own problems.
The Obama administration delivered a message Friday to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as Al Qaeda-inspired militants took control of more cities on their march toward Baghdad, reportedly leaving a trail of decapitated government forces in their wake: "Come together." [Emphasis added.]
Secretary of State John Kerry delivered the message, putting the onus on the Maliki government to "put sectarian differences aside and to come together in unity to begin to be more representative and inclusive." Republican lawmakers and military analysts are urging the administration to get more involved -- President Obama appeared to open the door Thursday to the possibility of air strikes, but no decision has been made. The president plans to make brief remarks on the situation in Iraq shortly before noon on the South Lawn.
Kerry said Friday the U.S. has "discussed a range of options including military action to provide support for the Iraqi government." He predicted "timely decisions" from the president.
The Obama Administration's position on the Israeli - Palestinian "peace process" has been similar, except that it became massively involved and sided against Israel. Perhaps Secretary Kerry will travel to Iraq and try to make his peace process --which failed in Israel and "Palestine" -- more effective there by siding with the ISIS and its friends. Unlikely, at least as long as the fighting rages.
Conlusions
The same incompetent "leader" who, for political purpose, refused to authorize a timely attempt to rescue Ambassador Stevens et al from Benghazi is now stumbling around trying -- someday -- to decide what, if anything, to do about the mess in Iraq. In all likelihood, if He ever decides what to do it will be too late. Will Iran completely displace the United States as Iraq's principal ally? It seems that she already is. The future for the entire Middle East does not look rosy as the already waning U.S. influence there approaches zero.
Great article. What a colossal failure by our president.
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A small force could have prevented this mess. If they couldn't be left in Iraq they could have stayed in the Kurdish north.
Exactly. There is a reason why we left troops behind in Germany and South Korea when those wars ended.
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Opinions
Marc Thiessen: Obama’s Iraq disaster
June 16 at 10:21 AM
In 2011, the situation in Iraq was so good that the Obama administration was actually trying to take credit for it, with Vice President Joe Biden declaring that Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.”
Now in 2014, as Iraq descends into chaos, Democrats are trying to blame the fiasco on — you guessed it — George W. Bush. “I don’t think this is our responsibility,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, declaring that the unfolding disaster in Iraq “represents the failed policies that took us down this path 10 years ago.”
Sorry, but this is a mess of President Obama’s making.
When Obama took office he inherited a pacified Iraq, where the terrorists had been defeated both militarily and ideologically.
Militarily, thanks to Bush’s surge, coupled with the Sunni Awakening, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI, now the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) was driven from the strongholds it had established in Anbar and other Iraqi provinces. It controlled no major territory, and its top leader — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — had been killed by U.S. Special Operations forces.
Ideologically, the terrorists had suffered a popular rejection. Iraq was supposed to be a place where al-Qaeda rallied the Sunni masses to drive America out, but instead, the Sunnis joined with Americans to drive al-Qaeda out — a massive ideological defeat.
Obama took that inheritance and squandered it, with two catastrophic mistakes:
First, he withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq — allowing the defeated terrorists to regroup and reconstitute themselves.
Second, he failed to support the moderate, pro-Western opposition in neighboring Syria — creating room for ISIS to fill the security vacuum. ISIS took over large swaths of Syrian territory, established a safe haven, used it to recruit and train thousands of jihadists, and prepared their current offensive in Iraq.
The result: When Obama took office, the terrorists had been driven from their safe havens; now they are on threatening to take control of a nation. Iraq is on the cusp of turning into what Afghanistan was in the 1990s — a safe haven from which to plan attacks on America and its allies.
It did not have to be this way. In 2011, the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, recommended keeping between 14,000 and 18,000 troops in Iraq (down from 45,000). The White House rejected Austin’s recommendation, worried about “the cost and the political optics.” So our commanders reduced their request to 10,000 — a number commanders said might be able to work “in extremis.” But the White House rejected this as well, insisting the number be cut to between 3,000 to 4,000 troops — a level insufficient to provide force protection and train Iraqis, much less to counterbalance Iran.
Iraqi leaders saw that the United States has headed for the exits — and decided that the tiny U.S. force Obama was willing to leave behind was not worth the political costs of giving Americans immunity from prosecution in the Iraqi judicial system. So Iraq rejected Obama’s offer, and the United States withdrew all its forces. And now ISIS is taking back cities that were liberated with American blood. It has taken control of Mosul, Tikrit and Tal Afar and is nearing the outskirts of Baghdad.
ISIS is not the only U.S. enemy taking advantage of power vacuum Obama left in the region. So is Iran. A month ago, Iraqi leaders asked the United States to carry out air strikes against ISIS positions but were rebuffed by Obama. So the Iraqis have turned to Iran for help. This weekend, the brutal commander of Iran’s notorious Quds Force, Gen. Quasim Suleiman, flew to Baghdad to advise the Iraqis on the defense of Baghdad. This is the man who organized and funded the Shia militias in Iraq, and armed them with EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) — sophisticated armor-piercing roadside bombs that killed hundreds of U.S. troops. And, if you thought matters could not get any worse, the Wall Street Journal reports that Obama “is preparing to open direct talks with Iran on how the two longtime foes can counter the insurgents.” Yes, you read that right. Obama is planning to work with Iran to counter ISIS in Iraq. In other words, our troops may soon be providing air cover for the very Iranians who were killing them.
If Obama had listened to the advice of his commanders on the ground, ISIS would probably not be marching on Baghdad today, and Iran would not be stepping in to fill the void left by the U.S. withdrawal. Thanks to Obama, we may soon have a situation where we are helping our Shia extremist enemies (Iran) fight our Sunni extremist enemies (ISIS) for control of Iraq.
That’s quite an “achievement.”
Read more from Marc Thiessen’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
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Who is really surprised?
A. Obama is full of shit
B. He has failed at every aspect of his job
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Who is really surprised?
Ozmo, lurkerthemoron, strawboy and that nitwit rrsnore.
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President Obama ignored general’s pleas to keep American military forces in Iraq
The Washington Times ^ | Rowan Scarborough
Posted on June 17, 2014 at 7:33:41 AM EDT by WhiskeyX
The last American commander in Iraq recommended to the Obama administration that 23,000 U.S. troops remain to cement the victory, but no deal was ever reached with Baghdad, and all combat forces went home.
[....]
Retired Army Gen. John M. Keane, who advised commanders in Iraq and helped devise the 2007 troop surge, remembers how the U.S. achieved victory by working hand in hand with Iraq’s military to conduct pinpoint strikes. The effort was so effective that the enemy, al Qaeda in Iraq, stopped sending killers into Iraq because they would be exterminated quickly.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
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President Obama ignored general’s pleas to keep American military forces in Iraq
The Washington Times ^ | Rowan Scarborough
Posted on June 17, 2014 at 7:33:41 AM EDT by WhiskeyX
The community organizer is a twink who thinks he knows more than anyone else.
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The community organizer is a twink who thinks he knows more than anyone else.
Generalisimo fagbama knows all.
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What Obama wrought
How the President's failure to act decisively has fed chaos in Syria and Iraq
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS /
Tuesday, June 17, 2014, 4:10 AM
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Share this URL .
Where the buck stops.
Kelvin Kuo/AP
Where the buck stops.
Highly organized and bloodthirsty, the radical Islamist army called ISIS took but a few days to subjugate the cities of northern Iraq as it dreams of taking over the entire country — while President Obama played it cynically cool.
The group’s stunning, barbaric march prompted the President on Friday to offer to review a range of options because America has “a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria.”
Returned now to the White House from a long-weekend family vacation in California, the President must face the awful reality that he dodged last week:
ISIS is already firmly in charge of large swaths of both of those countries, has ambitions to devour more and is showily slaughtering scores of captured and unarmed prisoners.
Al Qaeda Nation is being bloodily born before the world’s eyes.
The battle — for now and surely for the long run — has been lost, in no small part because Obama declined to show strength at crucial moments when strength was needed. Still worse, boxed in by his own failures, he’s flailing for a strategy desperately enough to consider partnering with Iran.
+++WARNING+++MUST PIXELATE +++GRAPHIC IMAGES+++ ISIS capture Iraqi Soldiers in the north of Iraq. The video footage, posted on June 16 2014, shows captured Iraqi soldiers believed to be Shiite, who are then executed by ISIS fighters believed to be from Tu
pamelagellar.com
Video released Monday by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) shows militants with men they say are Iraqi soldiers.
Yes, that Iran, the country whose regime has held Americans hostage, exported terror against the U.S., supplied weapons to insurgents who killed American troops in the Iraq War and driven insistently toward nuclear weapons capability. Just this month, the grand ayatollah there scoffed, “American cannot do a damn thing.”
Yes, that Iran. The taste in the mouth is awful.
The world is reaping what Obama helped sow.
Elected on the promise of ending the Iraq War, the President was true to his word. He wound down the conflict, enabling Vice President Joe Biden to boast in 2010 that Iraq was “one of the great achievements of this administration.”
“We’re leaving behind a stable and self-reliant Iraq,” Obama said in 2011 as the last U.S. troops left a war that cost nearly 4,500 of them their lives.
Cold-blooded terrorists slaughter more Iraqi soldiers, execution style, near the Syrian border in a photo released Monday.
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Cold-blooded terrorists slaughter more Iraqi soldiers, execution style, near the Syrian border in a photo released Monday.
But he left no residual force to combat terrorism, having failed to reach a troop agreement with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In our absence, ISIS grew quickly into a malignant force.
Made up of Sunni Muslims, who are a minority in Iraq and who despise the Shiite majority, ISIS staged more than 600 attacks in 2011, up from 34 the year before. With no U.S. troops to control them, and with Maliki repressing Sunnis, ISIS followed up in 2012 with more than 400 attacks.
When civil war broke out across the border in Syria, Obama proved impotent. He called for President Bashar Assad’s ouster to no avail. He threatened missile strikes if Assad used chemical weapons, then he dropped the threat after Assad fatally gassed 1,400 people. He considered and then ruled out providing militarily significant arms to moderate anti-Assad forces.
ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his fighters marched into Obama’s vacuum, seized territory in southern Syria and proclaimed in January that he planned to create his own domain by taking ground in Iraq, including the capital Baghdad.
He also made clear that he had a larger target, saying on an audio recording:
Returned now to the White House from a long-weekend family vacation in California, the President must face the awful reality that he dodged last week.
Win McNamee
Returned now to the White House from a long-weekend family vacation in California, the President must face the awful reality that he dodged last week.
“Our last message is to the Americans. Soon we will be in direct confrontation, and the sons of Islam have prepared for such a day. So watch, for we are with you, watching.”
You can’t say that Obama wasn’t warned.
Overeager to leave Iraq, gun-shy about intervening in Syria and insufficiently vigilant about the rising threat of ISIS, the President opened the way to an Islamist force of unprecedented power.
The toll wreaked by his disengagement from the world and retreat from the use of American influence is severe. While ISIS expands its reach with summary executions possibly running into the thousands, Obama is left to offload onto Maliki all responsibility for the chaos that’s happened and all that’s to come.
That's the easy way for Obama to escape admitting that he blew it.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/obama-wrought-article-1.1832083#ixzz34uA9Zh9e
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Ozmo, lurkerthemoron, strawboy and that nitwit rrsnore.
Surprised that after invading one of these infighting ME countries and totally screwing up the aftermath that the government we helped put in there is failing? NO.
We still shouldn't have ever invaded int he first place, but yes in retrospect leaving a small force behind might or might not have prevented what is going on there. OB may or may not should have found a way to get their government to let us leave troops there.
However, i really don't give a shit. We don't need to be there, we don't need our young men dying for those people.
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Surprised that after invading one of these infighting ME countries and totally screwing up the aftermath that the government we helped put in there is failing? NO.
We still shouldn't have ever invaded int he first place, but yes in retrospect leaving a small force behind might or might not have prevented what is going on there. OB may or may not should have found a way to get their government to let us leave troops there.
However, i really don't give a shit. We don't need to be there, we don't need our young men dying for those people.
Exactly what I have said in the past, but gay boi above simply can't understand it.
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Obama in 2011 takes credit for his actions in Iraq
Obama in 2014 blames W for Iraq falling apart into the hands of animals
That only makes sense to an Obama cultist
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3 years never happened.
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Obama in 2011 takes credit for his actions in Iraq
Obama in 2014 blames W for Iraq falling apart into the hands of animals
That only makes sense to an Obama cultist
Maybe you didn't realize but President Bush signed a treaty with the Iraq Government with the promise that all US troops would be out of Iraq by 2011.
Go look it up....then shut the fuck up
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Maybe you didn't realize but President Bush signed a treaty with the Iraq Government with the promise that all US troops would be out of Iraq by 2011.
Go look it up....then shut the fuck up
LOL - but Obama was not able to renegotiate a new Status Forces Agreement and was not interested in one correct? So again - 2011 he takes credit for what W did - and then in 2014 he blames W for it all falling apart. Some leadership right there ::)
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LOL - but Obama was not able to renegotiate a new Status Forces Agreement and was not interested in one correct? So again - 2011 he takes credit for what W did - and then in 2014 he blames W for it all falling apart. Some leadership right there ::)
Once a treaty is signed, you can't break it unless the Iraqi Government ask for help which they haven't. I think Obama did the right thing and now the Iraqi civilians are finally growing some balls and engaging the terrorists....and they are beating some ass and chopping their heads off.
Sorry, but I'm tired of hearing about US soldiers dying because Iraq and Afghans don't have any balls to take their lives into their own hands. That massacre woke them up finally and now they want revenge.....I say let him have a go at it.
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Once a treaty is signed, you can't break it unless the Iraqi Government ask for help which they haven't. I think Obama did the right thing and now the Iraqi civilians are finally growing some balls and engaging the terrorists....and they are beating some ass and chopping their heads off.
Sorry, but I'm tired of hearing about US soldiers dying because Iraq and Afghans don't have any balls to take their lives into their own hands. That massacre woke them up finally and now they want revenge.....I say let him have a go at it.
What you're seeing isnt civilians standing up to terrorists but tribal conflicts that are very old.
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What you're seeing isnt civilians standing up to terrorists but tribal conflicts that are very old.
I don't give a fuck....better them than us dying. After all, its their country
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I don't give a fuck....better them than us dying. After all, its their country
I dont disagree at all
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Maybe you didn't realize but President Bush signed a treaty with the Iraq Government with the promise that all US troops would be out of Iraq by 2011.
Go look it up....then shut the fuck up
It wasn't a treaty. It was a status of forces agreement.
Obama tried to negotiate a new one and failed.
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It wasn't a treaty. It was a status of forces agreement.
Obama tried to negotiate a new one and failed.
No, the Iraq government declined. I don't consider it a failure since the US doesn't rule Iraq
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wait a minute... this thread is baffling...
Obama was following BUSH'S WITHDRAWAL AGREEMENT, wasn't he? ???
I thought, for all his talk and promises and whatnot, he stuck with the SOFA that Bush put into place ??? Can anyone clarify what exactly Obama did wrong by OBEYING the Cheney/Bush SOFA plan for leaving? I thought that was one of the GOOD things Obama did - he kept in place the Bush2 plan and he followed it.
Republicans Blame Obama For Iraq When It Was Bush Who Signed The Agreement to Leave
What any of the Republicans blaming Obama for pulling American troops out of Iraq in 2011 should remember, is that in October 2008 George W. Bush was president when the Status of Forces Agreement was drafted and ratified by Iraqi lawmakers a month later in November 2008. The pertinent part of the agreement that President Obama honored was that, “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”
http://www.politicususa.com/2014/06/15/republicans-blame-obama-iraq-bush-signed-agreement-leave.html
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wait a minute... this thread is baffling...
Obama was following BUSH'S WITHDRAWAL AGREEMENT, wasn't he? ???
I thought, for all his talk and promises and whatnot, he stuck with the SOFA that Bush put into place ??? Can anyone clarify what exactly Obama did wrong by OBEYING the Cheney/Bush SOFA plan for leaving? I thought that was one of the GOOD things Obama did - he kept in place the Bush2 plan and he followed it.
Republicans Blame Obama For Iraq When It Was Bush Who Signed The Agreement to Leave
What any of the Republicans blaming Obama for pulling American troops out of Iraq in 2011 should remember, is that in October 2008 George W. Bush was president when the Status of Forces Agreement was drafted and ratified by Iraqi lawmakers a month later in November 2008. The pertinent part of the agreement that President Obama honored was that, “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”
http://www.politicususa.com/2014/06/15/republicans-blame-obama-iraq-bush-signed-agreement-leave.html
No it isn't. Not when you consider it is fueled by the two biggest idiots on the board Pole Toucher and Retardario.
Neither of those idiotic party shills has any brainwattage for computing logic or the concept of reality.
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No it isn't. Not when you consider it is fueled by the two biggest idiots on the board Pole Toucher and Retardario.
Neither of those idiotic party shills has any brainwattage for computing logic or the concept of reality.
The agreement W had is only news to ignorant no-info voters and messiah worshipping lemmings like yourself.
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wait a minute... this thread is baffling...
Obama was following BUSH'S WITHDRAWAL AGREEMENT, wasn't he? ???
You don't worry much about details.
He DID NOT follow Bush's withdrawal agreement when it came to a residual force remaining in Iraq DEPENDING on whether the Iraqi military was strong enough to defend its nation. Robert Gates was clear that tens of thousands of soldiers would remain as a residual force in order to enable or support the Iraqi army. The jokeinthewhitehouse wanted to keep only 3k instead of "tens of thousands" because he wanted complete withdrawal despite signs that the Iraqi military needed support. There were military officers who objected to a force of only 3k because it wasn't enough soldiers. Many Iraqi leaders felt the USA was not serious about helping them and therefore no "status of forces" agreement was reached.
Hilarious how other idiots like lurkerthemoron just believe your misinformed posts and like little girls rush to post utter nonsense.
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wait a minute... this thread is baffling...
Obama was following BUSH'S WITHDRAWAL AGREEMENT, wasn't he? ???
I thought, for all his talk and promises and whatnot, he stuck with the SOFA that Bush put into place ??? Can anyone clarify what exactly Obama did wrong by OBEYING the Cheney/Bush SOFA plan for leaving? I thought that was one of the GOOD things Obama did - he kept in place the Bush2 plan and he followed it.
Republicans Blame Obama For Iraq When It Was Bush Who Signed The Agreement to Leave
What any of the Republicans blaming Obama for pulling American troops out of Iraq in 2011 should remember, is that in October 2008 George W. Bush was president when the Status of Forces Agreement was drafted and ratified by Iraqi lawmakers a month later in November 2008. The pertinent part of the agreement that President Obama honored was that, “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”
http://www.politicususa.com/2014/06/15/republicans-blame-obama-iraq-bush-signed-agreement-leave.html
Obama didn't have a choice....a treaty agreement isn't invalidated by the changing of presidents.
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Obama didn't have a choice....a treaty agreement isn't invalidated by the changing of presidents.
So now it was a "treaty agreement"? What the heck is that?
Sounds like you don't know what a treaty is.