As Vice-President Joe Biden might say, restarting the Iraq War could be one of the great successes of the Obama administration!
Last weekend, U.S. warships sailed to the Persian Gulf as a precautionary measure against the advance of insurgent group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). The dangerous al-Qaida offshoot—whose leader the U.S. government set free in 2009—has taken over Iraq’s second-largest city Mosul and Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, and threatens to occupy Baghdad.
According to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), MSNBC’s Joy Reid, The New York Times’ Andrew Rosenthal, and Governor Lincoln Chafee (D-R.I.), all of this is George W. Bush’s fault.
In the final month of his Presidency, after the surge he ordered in 2007 had driven back Sunni insurgents and halted U.S. casualties, Bush signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that set a timetable for removing all U.S. troops by December 31, 2011. Knowing that the insurgents could simply wait us out and return when it was safe, Bush and his generals operated under the assumption that Obama would renegotiate with the Iraqi government in a couple of years’ time to leave some U.S. troops in Iraq if needed.
But Obama was intent on getting every last peacekeeping force out of Iraq to appease his anti-war base and keep his campaign promise “to end wars, not to start them.” Obama pretended to try to negotiate a new SOFA in 2011, but really he just wanted to close the book on Iraq so he could get back to his passion of ruining America domestically.
Now the U.S.’s hard-won victory is on the verge of collapsing. And all because Obama just had to prove that Bush’s vision for a democratic, rule-of-law-respecting Iraq was a misguided, neocon-driven fantasy.
Obama had to erase our involvement in Iraq and allow us to pretend we weren’t ever there. Never mind that we still have thousands of troops suited up in South Korea, among hundreds of other countries. Fallujah is a sunny, peaceful meadow, but in hotbeds of fundamentalist insurgency like Seoul, we’ve got to stay on guard.
If the public doesn’t buy the above rationalizations for why Obama is off the hook, then liberals will no doubt fall back on their familiar technique of decrying Republican “politicization” of events. But it’s not politicization if one side was consistently right, the other was consistently wrong, and the consequences of the other side’s mistake are as dire as the ones we see now. The public needs periodic reminders of which party can’t be trusted in foreign military conflicts.
Ending the Iraq War could have been one of the great successes of the Obama administration—a low bar, admittedly—if he had simply done what generals at the time begged him to do, and what any sane President would have done: keep thousands more troops in Iraq than he chose to do. But Obama would rather risk chaos and destruction, then twist the facts with the media’s help to avoid responsibility, than admit he was wrong.
