... completely withdraw U.S. military forces from Iraq by the end of 2011 is the primary reason that the Sunni jihadist terrorist group ISIS is now such an enormous problem (not only is this factually wrong, even characterizing the decision as a unilateral Obama Administration move is an oversimplification 1.) since the withdrawal date and terms were set by an agreement made with Iraq by the Bush Administration, 2.) since the Iraqi government, led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, refused to give American forces immunity if they stayed behind, the same reason that the Bush Administration did not accept the terms for a longer agreement, and 3.) the American people themselves decided to withdraw from Iraq in voting for Barack ...
... the “apostate” Shiite regimes there. The two big culminations of these efforts in Iraq were in 2006, when Iraq nearly erupted into full-scale civil war, and in 2014, when ISIS nearly marched on Baghdad after taking much of the country from Maliki’s sectarian Shiite regime. Now, for the past few years, the big magnet for idealistic Muslims willing to use violence in the form of jihad has been the Assad regime: though secular in ideology (Ba'athist), it is headed by Arab Alawite ...
... the point of having U.S. troops there anymore, shoring up a government that was unwilling to govern in the interests of all Iraqis? If anything, having U.S. forces there to support and protect his government when he was unwilling to compromise gave Maliki more cover to avoid reaching out to Sunnis and Kurds.
So by the time the Obama Administration completed the withdrawal of U.S. troops in December 2011, I had come to agree that, having spent blood and treasure to give Iraqi politicians breathing room to make politics work—the explicit stated objective of the “Surge”—while ...
... and mass oppression were to be overlooked if the “son of a bitch” leader was “our son of a bitch.” But this approach had helped create and had helped lead to many problems, including 9/11 and radical, terrorist Islam. How could Obama really help Maliki without being partly responsible for terrible things he was doing to Sunnis, things which drove them into the arms of ISIS? And yet, how could the U.S. not do something to help the people of Iraq—including 40,000 defenseless Yazidi civilians ...
