ISIS Is Obama’s Fault for Not Leaving Troops in Iraq, Right?

In their zeal to blame the President for everything gone wrong, politicians and pundits on the right count on Americans' diminished memories as time passes. They have discovered that no one challenges their blaming Obama for the rise of ISIS because he did not leave troops behind in Iraq. So media on the right has made it ritual simply to say that Obama's hurriedly pulling out our troops led to ISIS, and its endless repetition on outlets such as Fox News is how propaganda becomes perceived truth.

You'd never know that the withdrawal had been agreed to three years earlier from New York Times columnist David Brooks, who just said on the PBS NewsHour,

"the drawdown of troops was too fast, one of the biggest mistakes of the Obama presidency was to draw down the troops too fast."

You wouldn't know that Iraq chose to push us out if you read Jonah Goldberg at the National Review, who wrote, "Obama chose to pull troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible".

You wouldn't know when that magazine's editor Rich Lowry said Obama is a commander-in-chief with "a history of all but walking away from his military commitments" and on "Meet the Press" said that he "abandoned the war in Iraq", that ending the U.S. troop presence in Iraq was "an overwhelmingly popular demand among Iraqis", as reported at the time.

Bill Kristol, one of the original and unreconstructed neocons wrote an editorial in his Weekly Standard magazine titled “We Were Right to Fight in Iraq” that said Obama

"removed all U.S. troops from Iraq at the end of 2011" and "threw away hard-earned gains" with "this disastrous policy of withdrawal and retreat".

You never know that the departure was the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces — all 40,000 troops by the end of 2011 — was an agreement signed by George W. Bush in his last year in office.

A common phrase we hear from the blame throwers on the right is that Obama should have "tried harder" to negotiate keeping troops in Iraq when the time came. Never mind that we had fought to turn Iraq into a democracy, not a U.S. territory, a sovereign country with a parliament that got to decide such matters for itself. Iraq Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was unwilling to risk a confrontation with Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who controlled the largest bloc of parliament. U.S. troops remaining on Iraqi soil? The al-Sadr faction would have none of it. But surely the al-Sadr brigades that fought against and killed our troops would have been swayed by a sophomoric good old college try by Obama.

In making that try, Obama would have had to undo the "status of forces agreement" (SOFA) in an entirely hostile environment. We may have got rid of a dictator, but by trying to rule their country we had broken it and caused a bloody insurgency in which 4,500 Americans died, but what mattered more to Iraqis were the as many as half a million of their lives lost and two million displaced. They wanted us gone.

As example of the willful amnesia deployed to place blame on Obama, Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff under Bush, lied on Fox's "America's Newsroom" last June that "not having a status of forces agreement in Iraq is a horrible problem that President Obama is facing, and he created that problem". Dick Cheney also forgot who agreed to the troop removal. A Wall Street Journal piece says he thinks Republicans should scrutinize the withdrawal of U.S. troops under Obama.

But nothing tops the shameful attempt to deflect blame away from himself than narcissist Paul Bremer days ago saying,

"ISIS is the creation that happened after we pulled all of our troops out in 2011. That is the key mistake that was made by this administration".

That leaves one gasping for air. Bremer was the disastrous choice of George W. Bush to head the occupation government, the Coalition Provisional Authority, as its chief executive. He infamously made the worst decision of the war by disbanding the army shortly after the invasion, sending home several hundred thousand troops without paychecks but with their weapons who would form the insurgency, and several of them now showing up leading ISIS units. If you want to pick someone who set the stage for ISIS, it would be Bremer.

But the big lie about leaving troops behind is they were meant not for combat but only to train Iraq's security forces. Iraq certainly would not have then allowed combat troops to remain. And never mind that a contingent as small as the 3,000 Obama finally proposed would be adequate to combat the estimated 30,000 ISIS fighters. But the chorus blaming Obama for not leaving that token force behind can't pretend to be saying anything else.

All of the claims that Obama "should have tried harder" bury the most inconvenient fact of all: Iraq was unwilling to grant to U.S. troops immunity from prosecution. It would have been out of the question to accede to Iraq's demand that our military (in their country to help them, we might add) be subject to their laws. Imagine a soldier accused of a crime, whether real or trumped up by Iraqi elements wishing us gone, that leads to incarceration in an Iraqi prison, trial in an Iraqi court, and a conceivable death sentence. Imagine an agreement that left our troops open to that. Imagine media that dodges these facts in order to blame Obama for not leaving troops behind, which is what the right wing media did.

"Keep in mind, that wasn't a decision made by me", the President has said. "That was a decision made by the Iraqi government".

Max Boot, a contributing editor at the conservative Weekly Standard, knows better but tried a different tack in a Council of Foreign Relations article. He says the breakdown was the result of the Obama administration's insistence that immunity be ratified by the Iraqi parliament, an impossible hurdle. Why was that? Bush hadn't demanded that ratification in the 2008 SOFA, he argues. But we had 150,000 troops in Iraq at the time. When a trooper stepped out of line, the U.S. military dealt with its own; our force of arms denied Iraq any prospect of prosecuting our troops. One could say that the Bush administration was shortsighted for its failure to look ahead to when the troop count would wind down to small numbers without immunity protection. The Obama administration, in contrast, anticipated how vulnerable 10,000 or 3,000 would be to an agreement signed only by an Iraqi leader of the moment and not made into law by the country's parliament.

Last fall along came Leon Panetta, first Obama's CIA director, then secretary of defense, with a memoir in which he says he advocated for a residual force to remain in Iraq "but the President's team at the White House pushed back". The redoubtable ABC reporter Martha Raddatz, who has been to Iraq 21 times, has said the Obama administration originally "wanted 10,000 troops to remain in Iraq— not combat troops, but military advisers, special operations forces, to watch the counter-terrorism effort". That number was reduced to 3,000 in the hope that the smaller contingent would break the logjam with the Iraqis.

Panetta wrote, "To this day, I believe that a small U.S. troop presence in Iraq could have effectively advised the Iraqi military on how to deal with al-Qaeda's resurgence". He was saying that the same Iraqi military that has turned and run after the U.S. devoted the better part of a decade and billions of dollars to train would, in his view, performed entirely differently against ISIS had we "advised" them some more.

None of the commentariat choose to remember al-Maliki himself saying, "When the Americans asked for immunity, the Iraqi side answered that it was not possible", nor do they mention the headlines then that said "Immunity issue scuttled U.S. troop deal".

Rather than listen to Panetta blame shifting, why not ask someone who had actual war fighting experience in Iraq — and in Anbar Province? Charlie Rose had this conversation with Gen. David Petraeus,

Rose: As you know, there are people in the political world who will say "if the U.S. had left troops in Iraq, we would not be watching the rise of ISIS".
Petraeus: Well look, I supported leaving troops, as a number did around the situation room table, indeed the President, if we could have gotten...
Rose: But would leaving troops have led to impeding the rise of ISIS?
Petraeus: It's arguable, I'd like to have tested the proposition, but it is by no means certain. There were other agreements made at the time with President Obama's support that were not consummated and required no boots on the ground, no uniforms but would have helped him enormously; even those were not allowed to be brought to bear. I was involved in that so there is no guarantee that having them on the ground would have changed everything.

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