Though the Los Angeles Times is disappointed in President Obama’s decision to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan though 2017, the newspaper argues it’s not his fault.
“Obama gives up on goal to end the wars he inherited,” read a headline that suggested both that the president has failed on this issue, and that it’s the fault of former President George W. Bush.
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“President Obama on Thursday set aside his last hope of completely withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, sacrificing a long-desired goal in the interest of avoiding chaos in another former American war zone,” read the report authored by the Times’ Christi Parsons and W.J. Hennigan.
“[T]he decision to keep 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for most of the rest of his tenure, the number dropping to 5,500 in 2017, means giving up a moment that Obama had hoped to mark before he left office: the end of all but a U.S. Embassy presence in the locales of the two wars he had inherited from President George W. Bush,” it added, stressing again that the president’s predecessor is the one who is responsible for the mess.
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The move to leave troops in Afghanistan comes after months of fighting, as well as the rise of the Islamic State, which have threatened to plunge the region deeper into chaos.
Obama said this week that he is not “disappointed” in the decision.
“As your commander in chief,” he said, “I believe this mission is vital to our national security interests in preventing terrorist attacks against our citizens and our nation.”
He stressed that combat missions are over, but added that United States servicemen will still be in harm’s way as they attempt to maintain the peace.
“Obama’s objectives were clearer and more absolute when he ran for office in 2008, saying he would be the president to lead America out of war,” the Times claimed, explaining later that being president is a difficult job. “But as his tenure moves toward its final year, White House officials had increasingly begun to acknowledge that goal would not be achieved.”
The report stressed again that the situations in both Iraq and Afghanistan were already deeply troubled when “Obama inherited” them.
In 2012, when Obama campaigned for re-election against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, he and his supporters often trumpeted his plans for dealing with Afghanistan. Team Obama regularly claimed that their strategies were the correct ones, and they often accused the Republican Party of wanting to draw the conflicts out indefinitely.
“Fact: Unlike President Obama, Romney has no plan to end the war in Afghanistan and bring our troops home,” read one message posted to the president’s social media account.
The L.A. Times did little to challenge the president’s supposed plan to “bring the troops home.”
In fact, on Oct. 1, 2012 , the newspaper’s editorial board endorsed him again for president. Their endorsement even came with a mention about how he “inherited” chaos in the Middle East from Bush.
“When he was elected president in 2008, Barack Obama was untried and untested,” they said. “Today, Obama is a very different candidate. He has confronted two inherited wars and the deepest recession since the Great Depression. He brought America’s misguided adventure in Iraq to an end and arrested the economic downturn (though he did not fully reverse it) with the 2009 fiscal stimulus and a high-risk strategy to save the U.S. automobile industry.”
