MUST READ: "How Obama Lost Iraq and Allowed ISIS to Bloom"
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President Obama is playing his customary Blame Bush card, trying to heave the Iraq catastrophe, featuring the ISIS caliphate, onto his predecessor.
“ISIL is a direct outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,” Obama said in an interview with VICE News released Monday. “Which is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”
I suppose, if you try hard enough, you can find a way to blame the British or the Ottomans for ISIS. But the fact is that Obama was handed a stable Iraq by George W. Bush, who had real reasons to go into country, including what everyone thought was accurate intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
A piece in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs by Rick Brennan, a senior civilian adviser to the U.S. military in Iraq from 2006 through the end of 2011, lays out exactly what happened. It makes several things clear:
- The failure of the Iraqis to secure their country absent U.S. troops was predicted;
- Obama did not seek to keep nearly the number of U.S. troops in Iraq his commanders requested;
- The excuse that a status of forces agreement was not reached because U.S. troops would have been subject to Iraqi law is a canard. In fact, U.S. forces operating in Iraq today have less legal protection than they would have under a deal Obama could have struck in 2011 with then-Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki.
Let’s walk through the argument together.
The 2008 agreements negotiated by the Bush administration with the Iraqis called for U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011. The deal was the best Bush could get at the time and was always intended to be renegotiated, which is exactly what Obama was supposedly trying to do.
Military planners believed about 24,000 troops would need to remain in Iraq to maintain the peace, which had been achieved with enormous U.S. blood and treasure, and to continue to prepare Iraq to secure the the place on its own.
Otherwise, disaster would engulf the country. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which had been defeated, was nevertheless licking its wounds in Syria and rebranding itself. It could return. Withdrawal by the United States would also provide an opening for Iran in Iraq.
Brennan writes:
The military planners’ scorecard made one thing perfectly clear: by 2011, enough information was available to conclude that absent a significant U.S. military presence, within a few years, the situation in Iraq was likely to deteriorate — perhaps irreversibly.The Iraqi military, for example, was still three to five years away from being able to independently sustain the gains made during the past four years.
All of this turned out to be correct. ISIS was not specifically seen, though with substantial U.S. troops in Iraq, it likely would have been noticed:
Had a residual U.S. force stayed in Iraq after 2011, the United States would have had far greater insight into the growing threat posed by ISIS and could have helped the Iraqis stop the group from taking so much territory. Instead, ISIS’ march across northern Iraq took Washington almost completely by surprise.
Obama was having none of it.
In April (2011), Obama directed (U.S. forces in Iraq commander General Lloyd) Austin to develop a plan that would result in a residual force of just 8,000 to 10,000 troops and to identify the missions that a force of that size could realistically accomplish.In August, according to (then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq James) Jeffrey, Obama informed him that he was free to start negotiations with the Iraqis to keep 5,000 U.S. service members in Iraq: 3,500 combat troops who would be stationed on yearlong tours of duty and 1,500 special operations forces who would rotate in and out every four months.
As we know, Obama reached no deal for a continued U.S. troop presence. The president blamed the prospect of Iraqi legal purview over U.S. forces serving in the country.
Let’s talk about this.
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