Its fun to pile on Obama and he deserves it.
But it was Bush's mess.
Invading, occupying and democratizing poor dysfunctional crapholes where they hate us was a bad idea,
sadly I believed Bush, Cheney, Rummy etc in the early 2000s.
Don’t Blame Iraq on Obama Alone
Yep. I blame Hillary for a lot of this mess too.
“it was not Obama who agreed to the withdrawal schedule. It was President Bush.”
Assuming that we had a status of forces agreement with a secure base left behind.
The children are running the country. We need adults
You can blame anyone except for the neocons. Especially those at National Review. They’re NEVER wrong.
was the release of the Gitmo 5 part of the SOFA?
just saying
I am deeply disappointed in Andrew C McCarthy -— let me just leave it at that...
Is Obama ghost-writing for him now?!
Andrew C. McCarthy forgets where the buck stops.
Who is the chief executive?
Who is the one ultimately responsible?
“The buck stops here”, does he remember where that sign sat?
The problem is that the US government will not treat Islam for what it is. Islam is a religion AND government rolled into one. Islam is not satisfied until ALL OTHER RELIGIONS are subjugated to Islam.
Islam should NOT be recognized nor protected as a religion in the US. Until we make that move, we will be losing the war against Islam.
Its fun to pile on Obama and he deserves it.
But it was Bush's mess.
Invading, occupying and democratizing poor dysfunctional crapholes where they hate us was a bad idea,
sadly I believed Bush, Cheney, Rummy etc in the early 2000s.
Send weapons and cash to Al Qeada terrorist in Syria.
Ignore the Iraqi's plea for help against terrorism.
Ignore the Iraqi demands for air strikes on the advancing terrorist columns.
Blame the Iraqi government for the large powerful ISIS Blitzkrieg.
Or ignore the Kurds warning about ISIS's actual plans over a year ago.
Also, it was the neocons who wanted to topple Assad.
Obama said “I” got the troops out of Iraq. You’re not saying he lied to us are you Andrew?
McCarthy’s benevolence here is over the top.
>> persecution of religious minorities and homosexuals is routine.
Routine to what, Islam? What about the honor killings, repression of women?
>> Bush administration agreed to strict withdrawal deadlines
A complete withdrawal, no exceptions?
>> The 2008 SOFA is the basis for the American withdrawal that Obama so anxiously consummated.
Yeah, Bush’s fault. Especially in consideration of Obama’s allegiance to existing policies, and unwillingness to change things around — chart a different course. /s
No, Andrew, the destabilization of Iraq is NOT Bush’s fault.
[Warning Profanity]
OLD FOOTAGE from back in the Iraq war, American soldier trying to guide Iraqi police, sums up why Iraq failed, it never changed.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=760_1402758789
National Review has been very supportive of Obama lately.
No mentin the ISIS leader was released by Obama 5 years ago, no mention ISIS was outnumbered 40-1, no mentioned Obama is in cahoots with Iran. Obama has done everything possible to stop oil production in the US.
This is all a farce. Afghan opium is flooding world markets, Iran and Pakistan are ships, are being seized with tones of pure heroin India Ocean by Canadian and Australian ships and this isn’t being reported by US media. The major flow of heroin from Canada, and the epdedemic opiate addiction problem is the US is ignored by Federal agencies.
Now oil prices will go sky high. Didnt this happen with Carter. The OPEC cartels are also drug cartels. Taliban, Al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood are the criminal element of those cartels, supported by government.
Our government is TREAONOUS.
I normally really like mcCarthy, but this is deeply flawed.
The Bush administration refused to specify a terminus for Iraq in 2008. That was a huge part of the criticism of their policy.
Obama pressed primarily on a promise to end the Iraq war. Unlike most competent presidents, he did not complete a Status of Forces Agreement. While Bush had built preliminary frameworks for such an agreement, the Obama team specifically allowed it to collapse.
There were no provisions in 2009 for the return of our forces in a crisis like the one Iraq faces today. That is why Obama is struggling to construct a relationship now. That is absolutely not Bush’s fault.
Since Vietnam, the nation continues to struggle to restore the logic we understood until that time. We must completely defeat our enemies.
In many respects, the current Islamic Supremacist movement is little different than the Shinto Supremacists we faced in Japan. We still have troops deployed in Japan and Japan remains relatively demilitarized as the third largest world economy.
Some kind of defeat and occupation like that will be completed of the Islamic world.
The anti-American war movement composed by libertarian Paulites and lefty code pinkos must be defeated here at home in order for us to defeat our enemies. Until then, we earn only temporary vacations from evil.
Though shintoism is still practiced in Japan, there is nearly zero chance of that religion rising as it did 70 years ago to create the mega death machine that killed 20 million people. That is because our harsh military order stripped their rhetorical gears. This will be done to Islamic radicalism at some point in this century.
I sometimes think we need to simply allow the supremacists to turn more of our nation into craters so that isolationism can be thoroughly discredited. We cannot temporarily suspend evil. It must be soundly defeated and the moral alternative must always be clear. We must be the strong horse as Bin Laden said.
and to think Al-Quida was “on the run”. Little did I know Barry Hussein meant back to Iraq.
Osama Bin Laden is dead? Prove it. (oh that’s right, you dumped him overboard, then had Seal 6 team massacred)
Thanks for nothing Barry.
Andy appears here to suffer from the common confusion between the two frequently used meanings of the term "democracy."
One refers to a method by which leaders are chosen by a society.
The other refers to a massive complex of social institutions and attitudes which are more appropriately called "civil society."
The confusion results when McCarthy and others assume that A will necessarily result in B. Whereas it is entirely possible that a particular society will choose democratically (in "the people make the choices" meaning) to have a society that is not in the least democratic in the civil society sense of the word.
One thing is clear. GW Bush, supposedly a Christian, never lifted a finger to help one in the Middle East. He should have instituted a policy which would have allowed all persecuted Christians amnesty here while leaving the Islamists to fight each other.
I think we have to understand the situation in Iran as being driven by the Sunni vs. Shia centuries long feud and the theater of war, for now, consists of Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Seen from this theater wide perspective, our policy in these three countries is worse than incoherent it is mutually antagonistic. Andrew McCarthy sums it up brilliantly:
Today, a Sunni jihadist in Iraq might be killed by an American drone in support, incredibly, of the Iranian military intervention to prop up Iraq’s Shiite government. But if that same Sunni jihadist instead crosses the border into Syria, he will be given American-supplied weapons to fight against the Iranian military intervention that props up Syria’s Shiite government.
McCarthy's historical explanation for this incoherence is a 20 year willful blindness to the global jihadist challenge. I do not disagree but I think the reason is that we have not yet found a formula that works; not because we fail realistically to identify the threat, but because we are afraid to articulate the threat for fear of compromising our ability to enlist Muslims to neutralize Islamicists. That may have been Bush's motivation for failing the call the enemy anything but "terrorism." Allah alone knows what motivates Obama and his willful blindness.
McCarthy and McCain are at odds here. Most FReepers, I suspect counterintuitively, would side with McCain who is on the airways insisting that the war was won under George Bush; that a stable government was in place; that a small American presence without physical risk would have maintained the peace; that al Malaki would be intimidated by our mere presence into good behavior so the Sunnis would not be marginalized, energized and in revolt. McCarthy takes the view which I expressed in my 2006 piece incorporated below to the effect that the idea of imposing democracy on Islam is hopeless until the culture profoundly changes. More specifically, an outside third party, even the United States with all its might, cannot put Sunni and Shia together and expect peace for ever and ever.
One last observation about the current mess before appending the two pieces to which I referred: we must identify the most dangerous and imminent enemy. That clearly would be Iran in possession of atomic weapon. If we support the regime against the Sunni insurgents in Iraq we really risk combining the potential petrodollars of Iraq with the potential atomic power of Iran under Shia fanatics. Iran in possession of the atomic bomb and missiles or terrorists with which to deliver them would be an incalculable calamity and an existential threat to the United States.
Here is the piece, (October 2011) actually two in one:
So This Is How Iraq Ends, in Futility, Bitterness, and Recrimination
After nearly 5000 body bags, tens of thousands of limbs, and $1 trillion, Obama is skedaddling from Iraq, vainly attempting to put the best face on the ignominy of our departure which is demanded by the very Iraqi nation we built. A war, originally started to make us safe from weapons of mass destruction, was waged against a psychotic dictator who had no such weapons. We succeeded in regime change, which was a good thing and proceeded to build a nation, which was a futile endeavor. Somehow, we lost sight of our national strategic interests for which we sacrificed our blood and treasure.
Today, we are facing a new Islamist crescent, dominated by Iran, and running from Pakistan nearly to the Atlantic shores of northern Africa. One of these nations is in possession of nuclear weapons and a second, even more fanatical than the other, will soon be possessed of such a weapon and poses a real existential danger to the security of the United States. The original justification for the war, to prevent Iraq from building an atomic bomb and passing it off to terrorists who would smuggle it into America and destroy one or more of our cities, is even more threatening today than it was the day before we commenced hostilities.
Whatever gains we have made in making the American people safer have been achieved almost exclusively by virtue of national technical means and by old-fashioned spy vs. spy sleuthing.
Our national security posture is substantially weaker. The nation has contributed to its own bankruptcy by squandering trillions of dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan. The war has estranged us from Europe and left us vulnerable to attack through that flank. It has aroused and energized the Arab street. The Mexican border remains a backdoor open to infiltration by terrorists carrying weapons of mass destruction as small as a mason jar full of germs. At the other end of the spectrum, Iran is at the verge of obtaining an atomic weapon and the means to explode it in the heavens over the homeland which could knock out our electric grids and leave tens of millions to die of thirst and starvation because they would be beyond the nation's power to succor them.
Whatever chance we had to prevent Iran from getting the bomb was always limited to a military strike and that option was swallowed up in the sands of Iraq.
Out of bitterness and frustration, we have turned upon one another in recrimination, even blaming John McCain of all people.
As a result of the American electorate's frustration with the war, Republicans were driven from office on Capitol Hill just days after the piece quoted below was written and they were later driven from the Oval Office. Today, we are ruled over by a potential tyrant whose allegiance to this country is dubious. His elevation to the highest office in the world could not have happened without our involvement in Iraq.
The following is a post which I first put up on these boards on November 4, 2006. As it says at the foot of the post, I invite your reaction. I do not repost this out of vanity but out of frustration and an aching heart. Above all, I ask what have we learned and where are we going?
Here is the piece (November 2006):
Before the invasion I wrote that "God help me" I wanted the invasion to begin as soon as possible before the inspection regime or the French could so undermine the administration that the war could not be started.
Unlike these treacherous neocons, I will admit that I was wrong. In my own defense I can say, for what it's worth, that I was never seduced by the idea of imposing Wilsonian democracy on Iraq, although I of course would not have spurned it, but I saw the war in what I arrogantly believed were grown up and real world considerations of geopolitics. I wanted forward bases in the Mideast from which to strike at Syria and Iran if intimidation alone did not work. I wanted us to get our hands on the oil fields to deprive Muslim terrorists of petrodollars with which to buy weapons of mass destruction. I wanted us to demonstrate to the Muslim world that no leader could sleep safe if he played a double game with America. I wanted to so intimidate the Muslim world with our military prowess that they themselves would turn against the terrorists in their midst because I believed, and still believe, that the only way we ultimately can win this war is to turn the sane Muslims against the crazies. And, of course, I wanted a regime change as the only effective defense against WMD's in Iraq. My mistake, and I believe Bush's, was to underestimate the tenacity of the Muslim belief system and to see the war in a two dimensional geographical box, like a game of checkers, where squares were to be taken and held.
Not only was I wrong but the result has been calamitous and every one of the "strategic" reasons for waging war in Iraq have been stood on its head. I suspect that the main reason there has been no terrorist attack on the heartland is because Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, as well as Iran, are quite content to see America founder in Iraq. Iran, likewise, is the big winner from all of this as it moves closer to upsetting the entire balance of power in the Middle East when it acquires the bomb and perhaps fashions a Shi'ite Crescent running to the Mediterranean Sea. I believe my error came out of the false understanding of the nature of the global intergenerational war against terrorism: that somehow it was a war which could be conceived of in geographical terms. It is not-- although if it is lost the ultimate impact will be geographical. This is a war for the soul of Islam and we must not lose our own souls before we can save theirs.
Perhaps the very worst legacy of this whole Irak tragedy is that we are a daily demonstrating to the world that we are presently incapable of winning asymmetrical wars of terrorism. The Israelis just proved that in Lebanon. The people in Afghanistan are beginning to understand it. The tide in the Muslim world is rising against us as their fear drains away. So the goal of saving the soul of Islam has been made more elusive.
To compound the catastrophe, the "socialist" world of Cuba and Venezuela, Russia and China can read the daily events in Iraq and are emboldened as they have not been since the first Iraq war and seem eager to make mischief 1960s style.
Meanwhile, we've increased the danger of losing our own soul as defined as the will to win. Western Europe already lacks it and half of America possesses an anemic red blood count. Another tragedy of the Iraq war might will be to cause the installation of a Democrat regime in America which will align itself with the appeasers in Europe and so fatally succumb to jihad. The danger is as near as next Tuesday when, if the Republicans suffer a stinging repudiation of the polls, Bush might be left in as feckless a state as Gerald Ford was during the final pathetic agony of Vietnam.
Our dilemma is that we cannot win in Iraq and we cannot abandon it. We cannot win until we learn how to fight asymmetrical insurgencies against our occupation. We show no evidence that we have any idea how to do this at a price America is willing to pay. The training up of Iraqi forces, especially the police, is clearly a failure. So we are mired in a situation that spills our blood and empties our treasury and turns our friends against us. Meanwhile, the existential threat against America, represented by Iran's possession of a nuclear weapon which it passes off to terrorists to explode in the heartland, grows daily closer to reality. Our efforts in Iraq have so attenuated our military force that we probably cannot mount an invasion and air power alone probably cannot interdict Iran's nuclear program. This is well known to the whole world and especially to Iran so our ability to intimidate the Iranians into good behavior has bled into the sands of Iraq along with the Bush Doctrine.
Soon it will be fashionable even in conservative circles to blame Bush just as the neocons now are doing so ignominiously. My belief is that the miscalculation was to presume that the Iraqis, read Muslims, would behave rationally when presented with the opportunity for self-determination and democracy. It is not really that we made fatal tactical military mistakes in Iraq which we can lay at the feet of Bush or Rumsfeld, rather it is the nature of the traditional Muslim society that caused all of this bloodshed to be inevitable. Iraq has revealed that America has no stomach for the pain which must be endured to see such a traditional Muslim society through to Western democratic values.
Asymmetrical warfare works against armies of occupation but these tactics do not work against 21st-century Blitzkrieg, American-style. I fear that the American military will engage in another Vietnam style soul-searching and draw the wrong conclusion, that military force does not work at all in the war against terrorism. I am tempted, therefore, to argue that it was the occupation and not the war itself which was the bridge too far. After Iraq, I am humble enough to admit and perhaps it is I who misses the lesson.
I am well aware that new military adventures will be virtually impossible to sell until the inevitable happens: a strike is made against the homeland. If Al Qaeda strikes with anything less than a mortal blow, ie. a series of nuclear explosions, America might yet be able to find its finest hour. But strike it must if Al Qaeda intends fulfill its ambitions. God grant that they settle for half a loaf with an intensity level not exceeding 911.
We must fashion a new policy, a new strategy for winning this intergenerational worldwide war against a portion of 1.4 billion Muslims who inhabit the earth. We must turn rational Islam against this jihad or we will perish because we will rot from the inside out or we will simply surrender after our cities are turned into glass. We cannot hope to prevail if we eschew all military operations as ultimately counterproductive. We must find what works. Above all, we must not lose our soul.
I would be grateful for your reaction to all this. 