There have so far been two general election debates. At each one, Team Democrat tried to downplay the Iraq troop departure by returning to the tried-and-true method of blaming George W. Bush. Because hey, 2008 wasn’t that long ago, right?
At the first presidential debate, presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said that it was Bush who made the agreement to withdraw troops, implying President Obama’s hands were tied because of his dastardly predecessor.
“George W. Bush made the agreement about when American troops would leave Iraq, not Barack Obama,” Clinton said. “And the only way that American troops could have stayed in Iraq is to get an agreement from the then-Iraqi government that would have protected our troops, and the Iraqi government would not give that.”
Then at the vice presidential debate, Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine echoed her statement. It was amazing how Clinton was able to drink water while he spoke (just kidding, Clinton doesn’t drink water).
“President Bush said we would leave Iraq at the end of 2011. And Iraq didn’t want our troops to stay, and they wouldn’t give us the protection for our troops,” Kaine said. “And guess what? If a nation where our troops are serving does not want us to stay, we’re not going to stay without their protection.”
I find it funny how desperately they’re trying to spin this now. In doing so, they make Obama look weak, as if he wasn’t really president for the past eight years and the country was still being run by Bush. It also undermines Obama’s bragging over “ending” the war. Did Obama not say multiple times, including at a White House press conference, that he ended the war? I don’t recall him standing before the American people and saying “Thanks to a timeline set by President Bush…”
Obama even promised to end the war when he was running in 2008, when Bush signed the agreement. So what gives?
Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler added some much-needed context to Clinton and Kaine’s statements. He said the Bush agreement was “technically true” but “obscures more than it illuminates.”
Bush, he wrote, didn’t want to set a fixed date, and initially agreed to remove combat troops by 2011 but leave 40,000 to remain. The Iraqi prime minister reneged on the deal, and Bush begrudgingly signed an agreement that all troops would leave by that date, hoping the next president would be able to negotiate an extension.
The Obama administration initially thought there would be an extension as well, but for reasons that Kessler outlines but I won’t get into, it didn’t happen. Obama’s former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, would later blame Obama’s indifference for his failure to negotiate the status of forces agreement. But Obama was more than happy to take credit for ending the war, and made it a big part of his 2012 re-election campaign.
As the rise of the Islamic State made it clearer what a disaster the quick and complete pull-out had become, the Obama administration — and now Clinton and Kaine — began blaming the withdrawal on others. Usually that blame rested on the Iraqi government, and they certainly played a part, but now Bush is getting added into the mix because it’s an election year and Democrats still see him as the devil.
Kessler awarded Clinton and Kaine two Pinocchios for their statements because they ignore the Obama administration’s efforts to keep troops in Iraq, and their bragging about ending the war until the Islamic State’s rise made it clear the troop withdrawal was a bad idea.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
