... communities against them and denying al-Qaeda's Iraqi franchise safe havens and popular support. This defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq/the Islamic State of Iraq was over four years before U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq and almost two years before Obama took office.
2.) The Current ISIS Threat Did Not Emerge From Iraq, It Emerged From Syria
After the success of the “surge” and local Sunnis fighting-side-by-side with U.S. forces against al-Qaeda in Iraq/the Islamic State of Iraq ended in crushing defeat for the terrorists, for years after the group was little more than ...
... 2nd, 2015
@ValkryV
Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse
AMMAN — Anyone who’s been paying attention to the Syrian vortex of death, and Russia’s role in this vortex, knows that Putin’s motivations are not terribly difficult ... ...
As far as who learns from history, for now, the U.S. has a president in office now who campaigned on the fact that invading Iraq in 2003 was a colossal mistake, who, keeping this in mind, intervened only lightly in Libya and went out of his way to avoid ...
... people, weary of war after the disasters of the (W.) Bush Administration, began to see Obama’s moves to engage in limited strikes in Syria as all too similar to Bush’s moves to invade Iraq; they failed to see, as I myself made clear, that Syria 2013 was not Iraq 2003, and that Obama is not Bush, for despite the support of both the top Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, Speaker of the House John Boehner, and the top Democrat in the same body, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, few others of either party in Congress ...
... to complain about here, and I agree that a residual force would have been better but that is 100% on Maliki not granting immunity and having already committed to his Iranian allies that he would see our troops out in 2011. We will come to ISIS (and Obama’s mild military reengagement in Iraq) and Syria as separate issues.
Israeli/Palestinian Peace
Here, one may be tempted to make more of the efforts of the Obama Administration than they actually represent, but at the same time we should not minimize them.
To be sure, Obama has publicly ...
... admittedly be silly to argue that the U.S. does not bear the most overall responsibility for the big-picture situation in Iraq over the course of the last decade and then some).
During this roughly three-year period, things got really bad in both Syria and Iraq. Obama came close to, but ultimately backed down from, direct intervention in Syria against Assad in September 2013, deferring to a Russian proposal to disarm Assad’s chemical weapons peacefully and opting for meager, tepid, and inconsistent support ...
