People call Obama an isolationist. I think it's not a bad idea to have these countries bear most of the cost of defending themselves. If they look like they're about to lose, we can always jump in. The reason that we have always been reluctant to join overseas wars is the same reason everybody else is reluctant. Wars take a toll on the nation's finances and the lives of our young men, even if they are not physically injured or worse. If we had jumped in early in both WWI and WWII, our butcher's bill would have been far higher than it turned out to be. Ultimately, foreign countries should bear most of the cost of defending themselves - after all, it's not our lands that are in danger of being overrun.
Well, we should have partitioned Iraq. Why do we need to respect borders the British made up decades ago, when they just won’t work. That’s on Bush as well as Obama. And we needed to let Maliki know he had something to lose if he pushed the Sunnis so hard war was inevitable.
Bull! He did it to win an election, period! He ignored his military generals and intelligence. And He telegraphed it all for the enemy! It’s absolutely disgusting what that jerk did after all our troops’ blood sweat and tears ....and victory .....spent there! Iraq became a crucial ally in a horrible part of the world. Whether we like it or not, we needed to keep a strong presence there to keep the terrorist element from taking hold and to watch Iran and Syria. It takes more than a few years or a decade for a war torn nation to get back on their feet completely. We still have troops in Europe and Japan! You cannot simply go into a shell...there is no freaking isolation. We weren’t there for Iraq, we were there for the United States. We were there for many strategic reasons...and for a foreign policy that used to be there for OUR protection - not the Obama policy of protecting Islamists. That said, Bush really mishandled the whole thing from the get-go. His second term was embarrassing.