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

President Obama's multiple foreign policy lapses have taken a thumping that reached a crescendo when the rapid strikes by ISIS into Iraq took his
administration by surprise. It would be redundant for this page to recite the litany of missteps, but there is one item that jumps out as an attempt to blame the President for everything gone wrong and shows how our polarized media so often sees fit to leave out inconvenient facts.

It has become habitual for the media on the right to blame Obama for not leaving troops behind in Iraq, and some on the left have repeated this meme — never mind that the Iraqi government denied his request to leave even the 3,000 that he proposed; never mind that so small contingent would be inadequate to combat the estimated 30,000 ISIS fighters; never mind that they were meant not for combat but only to train Iraq's security forces.

When National Review editor Rich Lowry said this 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", there was no mention that ending the U.S. troop presence in Iraq was "an overwhelmingly popular demand among Iraqis", as reported at the time, and that 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, about U.S. troops remaining on Iraqi soil. The al-Sadr faction would have none of it.

You'd never know that from Lowry's colleague at the magazine, Jonah Goldberg, who writes, "Obama chose to pull troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible".

Nor would you know, when the Weekly Standard's John McCormack writes that Obama "wasn't seriously pushing for" keeping troops in Iraq, that the withdrawal was in compliance with a "status of forces agreement" that called for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2011, an agreement that was signed by George W. Bush in his last year in office.

Blaming Obama for not "seriously pushing for" an agreement is disinformation; he would actually have had to undo an existing agreement and to do so in the face of — as we have shown — an entirely hostile environment.

As example of the willful amnesia needed to place blame on Obama, Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff under Bush, voiced the bewildering claim on Fox's "America's Newsroom" in 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".

And all of the claims that Obama "should have tried harder" bury the most inconvenient fact of all, that Iraq was unwilling to grant immunity from prosecution to U.S. troops. 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 a media that dodges these facts in order to blame Obama for not leaving troops behind.

"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. After all, Bush hadn't demanded that in the 2008 SOFA. But there were 150,000 troops in Iraq at the time. The U.S. military dealt with its own who stepped out of line; we had immunity from Iraq insisting on prosecuting our troops by force of arms. One could say that the Bush administration's failure to look ahead to when the troop count would wind down to small numbers without immunity protection was shortsighted. The Obama administration, in contrast, anticipated how vulnerable 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.

Now along comes Leon Panetta, first Obama's CIA director, then secretary of defense, and now author of 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". If it's correct to call out the President for exculpating himself and blaming the intelligence services for missing the rise of ISIS, it is fair to say it looks like Mr. Panetta is finger-pointing, to make the case that no one can blame him.

Panetta says Obama didn't want to leave any troops behind. 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 writes, "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 is saying that the same Iraqi military that turned and ran after the U.S. devoted the better part of a decade and billions of dollars to train would have, in his view, performed entirely differently against ISIS had we "advised" them some more.

Turncoat Panetta (again — once a Republican, he became a Democrat) is now ubiquitous on the television circuit, peddling his book. Even some of the folks on Fox News were left wondering ("political machinations"?) about this duplicity.

None of 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". Panetta is criticizing the President for not taking advice as if Obama was free to act but did not want to. Artfully backed into that corner by Jon Stewart, all Panetta could say was "we probably could have pushed him a little more".