Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Victor Davis Hanson posts on how “War was interested in Obama.”
Leon Trotsky probably did not quite write the legendary aphorism that “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” But whoever did, you get the point that no nation can always pick and choose when it wishes to be left alone.
Barack Obama, however, never quite realized that truth, and so just declared that “the world is less violent than it has ever been.” He must have meant less violent in the sense that the bad guys are winning and as they do, the violence wanes — sort of like Europe around March 1941, when all was relatively quiet under the new continental Reich.
One of Obama’s talking points in the 2012 campaign included a boast that he had “ended” the war in Iraq by bringing home every U.S. soldier that had been left to ensure the relative quiet and stability after the successful Petraeus surge. In the world of Obama, a war can be declared ended because he said so, given that no Americans were any longer directly involved. (Remind the ghosts of the recently beheaded in now al Qaeda-held Mosul that the war ended there in 2011.)
Iraq is in flames, as is “lead from behind” Libya, as is “red line” Syria, and as are those places where an al Qaeda “on the run” has migrated. Had Obama been commander in chief in 1940, he would have assured us that the wars in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France were “over” — as they were in a sense for those who lost them, but as they were not for those next in line. …
Charles Krauthammer reminds us of the Iraq this administration inherited from W.
… “A sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.” That’s not Bush congratulating himself. That’s Obama in December 2011 describing the Iraq we were leaving behind. He called it “an extraordinary achievement.”
Which Obama proceeded to throw away. David Petraeus had won the war. Obama’s one task was to conclude a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to solidify the gains. By Obama’s own admission — in the case he’s now making for a status-of-forces agreement with Afghanistan — such agreements are necessary “because after all the sacrifices we’ve made, we want to preserve the gains” achieved by war.
Which is what made his failure to do so in Iraq so disastrous. His excuse was his inability to get immunity for U.S. soldiers. Nonsense. Bush had worked out a compromise in his 2008 SOFA, as we have done with allies everywhere. The real problem was Obama’s determination to “end the war.” He had three years to negotiate a deal and didn’t even begin talks until a few months before the deadline period.
He offered to leave about 3,000 to 5,000 troops, a ridiculous number. U.S. commanders said they needed nearly 20,000. (We have 28,500 in South Korea and 38,000 in Japan to this day.) Such a minuscule contingent would spend all its time just protecting itself. Iraqis know a nonserious offer when they see one. …
However, Andrew McCarthy says it is wrong to blame the Iraq collapse on barry alone.
… It is pretty safe to say I am no fan of Barack Obama’s. But it is just as safe to say that for Beltway Republicans to blame Obama alone for the implosion of Iraq — which is now being overrun by the same Sunni jihadists those Republicans have championed in Syria and Libya — is shameful.
Look, I will stipulate that the president’s signature recklessness is abundantly evident in Iraq. He heedlessly withdrew U.S. forces, making no effort to preserve the security gains they achieved in routing al-Qaeda, even as it became obvious that the withdrawal had evaporated those gains and invited the terror network to return with a vengeance.
Still, it was not Obama who agreed to the withdrawal schedule. It was President Bush. And it was not Obama who turned Iraq into an Islamic-supremacist state seething with anti-American and anti-Semitic hatred. Long before Obama came to power, Iraq was an Islamist country, rife with Sunni and Shiite militants who agreed on little else besides their devotion to sharia and their abhorrence of the West.
In late 2008, several weeks before Obama entered the Oval Office, I wrote here about the status of forces agreement (SOFA) the Bush administration was then entering into with the ingrate Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki. Even then, Iraq was pulling ever closer to the terrorist regime in Iran while American troops continued fighting to protect Maliki’s fledgling government from al-Qaeda jihadists — jihadists that the insidious mullahs were also supplying with money, training, and IEDs.
In the SOFA, the Bush administration agreed to strict withdrawal deadlines that invited al-Qaeda to catch its breath, wait out the United States, then resume the jihad as Americans were leaving — the better to make it look to the world like they were chasing us out. …
Pickings readers understand when the state wishes to achieve a goal, its efforts will usually result in the exact opposite, because “the government always f**ks up.” The Telegraph’s Charles Moore says the “peace president is starting to leave a legacy of war.”
… The new American foreign stance was to be chilly towards friends and nicer towards enemies. Out went the bust of Churchill from the Oval Office, and the Obama administration sent no high representative to Lady Thatcher’s funeral. Israel and Saudi Arabia, America’s most important allies in the Middle East, felt disrespected. There was a sharp contrast between Obama’s dropping of his country’s old friend Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in the face of the Arab Spring, and Putin’s staunch and successful defence of his ally, Bashar al-Assad, in Syria. In Iran, the country where pro-Western feeling is strongest among the population, President Obama did nothing to fertilise the shoots of the “green revolution”, and effectively let the Islamist regime develop its nuclear programme unmolested.
And, of course, he did not like anything military. He withdrew from Iraq, leaving it without US troops and without proper intelligence, and began to do the same from Afghanistan. By a paradox that often afflicts leaders who shun military affairs, he ordered quite a number of deaths. He had Osama bin Laden killed and became the master of the drone strike. When he finally came round to the idea of doing something about Assad’s chemical weapons, he sought (and failed to get) what one critic in the Congress called “legislative authority for a drive-by shooting”.
Mr Obama is not a pacifist. He sees the utility of force in individual tricky situations. It would not be at all surprising if he uses a bit of it soon, in drone or aerial form, in Iraq. What he does not see is its strategic value. He does not grasp, apparently, that the Pax Americana, under whose protection we have lived since 1945, has existed because it has always been backed by the credible threat of force. Weakness is provocative to bad actors, and some of the world’s worst have now been provoked. This seems to have come as an almost complete surprise to the Obama White House. The Peace President is starting to leave a legacy of war. …
These days it is pretty rare when the New Yorker gets it right, so the article by Dexter Filkins referred to here last week gets another look, this time from Peter Wehner. The Filkins piece is 11,000 words, so too long for Pickings. But, the you can follow the above link if you wish. Wehner ends like this;
.. To sum up, then: post-surge, Iraq was making significant progress on virtually every front. The Obama administration said as much. The president was not engaged or eager to sign a new SOFA. A full withdrawal was the right decision. His own top advisers admitted as much. The president had long argued he wanted all American troops out of Iraq during his presidency, and he got his wish. He met his goal.
The problem is that in getting what he wanted, Mr. Obama may well have opened the gates of hell in the Middle East.
Here’s Roger Cohen of the heretofore administration-friendly NY Times.
… Force in the absence of a sustained political and diplomatic strategy leads nowhere. This has been Obama’s failure in Afghanistan, where the United States never invested much capital in a diplomatic solution involving negotiation with the Taliban; and in Iraq, where the president allowed American forces to withdraw without leveraging the massive U.S. investment there into ensuring that the sectarian Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki reached out to the Sunnis and Kurds.
Maliki is a Nixonian figure who sees enemies everywhere, especially among Sunnis. Like Nixon, he was elected democratically. But Obama should never have allowed Maliki to indulge his worst, petulant instincts. Now it is too late. Asking him to be inclusive won’t convince a single Sunni from Mosul to Riyadh. The exercise is as pointless as asking Assad to be a democrat. It smacks of an earnest naïveté. Progress in Iraq and Syria hinges on moving beyond Maliki and Assad. …
Harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend; that’s what our country has become. Now the US government has turned on Maliki and wants him to leave Iraq. Andrew Malcolm writes on that and reminds what we did in Vietnam to the Diem Bros.
… If he knows what’s good for him and a little history about America’s deadly diplomacy when frustrated, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, might want to change his behavior toward Sunnis rather quickly.
And not just because the barbaric ISIL rebels are bearing down on Baghdad from the north, leaving beheadings and mass graves along the trail.
From Maliki’s autocratic viewpoint, he’s been quite rational. Obama proved untrustworthy with his sly maneuvers to exit Iraq quickly, making the lack of a residual U.S. troop presence appear Maliki’s fault. So, the Iraqi leader instinctively surrounded himself with loyal fellow Shiites.
Last winter when Maliki sought U.S. help against advancing radical Islamists, Obama ignored him, focusing instead on his Afghan exit. So, Maliki is sidling up to Iran next door.
Obama is batting .666 ousting governments he dislikes. The Nobel Peace Prize winner was successful when he announced Libya’s Gaddafi had to go. With allied help, Obama forced him to run where an angry mob could spot him and save court costs. Obama also said Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak had to go, when he was no longer useful. …