... recently noted, would have played completely into ISIS’s strategy and in its favor (Putin, ironically, seems to be making this very mistake in Syria with how he is using Russian forces there).
*****
So now, next time you hear people say “Obama pulled out of Iraq and now we got ISIS as a result!” you can tell them they simply do not know the clear history or facts and that their statements are ignorant myths, and explain why this is so obviously the case. In a clear measure of their gross incompetence ...
... a war that lasted through most of the 1980s and precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the entire Soviet Union.
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 being entangled in Syria. Meanwhile, Russia is placing a significant (though not huge) presence on the ground in Syria and ...
... 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 ...
... Administration deserved some credit as well for agreeing to the initial timetable to which Obama stuck. And, as will be discussed below, he handled the ISIS in Iraq debacle in a way that very much aided Iraq’s long-term interests.
Grade: A+
Obama withdrew from Iraq and was ahead of the curve compared to many in realizing American troops could not bring about the politics necessary to stabilize Iraq, but he did so in a responsible, gradual way that no sane person could say caused a drastic power vacuum or directly ...
... 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 ...
