It’s bogus, dude! Stop just hatin’ all the time. Concede that Barack Obama is a fantabulous president who gets a bum rap because of Fox News’s “phony scandals” and the refusal of House Republicans to work with him at completing his fundamental transformation of the United States of America.
The bottom line is it’s not his fault (again). True, we are now sowing the consequences of not leaving a residual force in Iraq. Some Democrats are worried about mission creep while others are warning that ISIL wants to bring the fight “our backyard.” But, dude, stuff happens. It’s like so … so bogus to blame Obama. Just listen to him tell it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxfQUwmRlmI
What I think is interesting is how often this keeps coming up as if it was my decision. Under the previous administration, we had turned over the country to a sovereign democratically-elected government. We had offered to leave additional troops. The reason that we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq is that the majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there.
Short Obama: I was all in favor of leaving troops behind, but Maliki wouldn’t sign a status of forces agreement.
But that’s not quite the impression shared by the left-leaning media. Here’s Dexter Filkins writing in the New Yorker in April of this year:
President Obama … was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis – like how many troops they wanted to leave behind – because the administration had not decided. “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me. “We didn’t know where the president was. Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ” At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama administration quickly rejected the idea. “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,” Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said.
When Obama announced the withdrawal, he portrayed it as the culmination of his own strategy.
“After taking office, I announced a new strategy that would end our combat mission in Iraq and remove all of our troops by the end of 2011,” he said. “So today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.”
Sorry, dude. It was your idea to cut and run. The blame belongs to you. The only thing that’s bogus is calling you president.
(h/t Pat Dollard)
