SoFA was always meant and expected to be renegotiated upon, when Bush had originally signed it in October of 2008; and its’ been argued that if the Obama Administration had pushed hard for it (they lacked true interest and will, having sent Biden and a JV team of negotiators shortly before the SoFA deadline for troop withdrawal kicked into effect), they could have successfully kept a troop presence in Iraq (with immunity from Iraqi courts) for our national security interests and that of the Iraqi government, as well as exercise a continued muscular influence and guidance over Maliki, who needed it. It’s what the Bush Administration did.
This is a lengthy blogpost, mostly because it’s a collection of relevant links and blockquotes to counter-argue the belief by Bush critics that it’s because of Obama’s predecessor that ISIS was created; and that one of the conditions that made it possible was SoFA- another Bush blame.
The assertion that President Obama’s hands were tied and he was forced to abide by the conditions of the SoFA on account of President Bush is baloney. The Administration did try to negotiate- but too little, too late; and frankly, I don’t believe President Obama’s heart was truly into it. In my humble opinion for what it’s worth, Iraq is merely a distraction from his focus on the domestic front.
The claim that Iraqis wanted us out is also not quite the whole story. A number of officials have stated that, off the record, Iraqi politicians may not have boldly stated it publicly, but a number of Iraqis wanted U.S. forces to remain in Iraq for the sake of security and stability.
Then Hillary Rodham Clinton declared during the book tour for her memoir that Obama’s “failure” to arm and train Free Syrian Army rebels “left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.”
Now comes Leon Panetta with a new memoir, “Worthy Fights,” in which he lays responsibility for the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the rise of the Islamic State where it belongs — directly at Obama’s feet.
Panetta writes that he warned Obama of the danger of withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq: “My fear, as I voiced to the President and others was that if the country split apart or slid back into the violence that we’d seen in the years immediately following the U.S. invasion, it could become a new haven for terrorists to plot attacks against the U.S.” But when he and Obama’s military commanders recommended keeping 24,000 troops, “the President’s team at the White House pushed back, and the differences occasionally became heated.” The White House, Panetta says, was “so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.” Now, “the ISIS offensive in 2014 greatly increases the risk that Iraq will become al-Qaeda’s next safe haven. That is exactly what it had in Afghanistan pre-9/11.”
Leon Panetta’s Worthy Fights, page 392-4:
When President Obama announced the end of our combat mission in August 2010, he’d acknowledged that we would maintain troops for a while. As he put it, “Going forward, a transitional force of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq with a different mission: advising and assisting Iraq’s security forces; supporting Iraqi troops in targeted counterterrorism missions; and protecting our civilians. Consistent with our agreement with the Iraqi government, all U.S. troops will leave by the end of next year.” Now that the deadline was upon us, however, it was clear to me- and many others- that withdrawing all our forces would endanger the fragile stability then barely holding Iraq together.
~~~ We had leverage.
~~~ My fear, as I voiced to the president and others, was that if the country split apart or slid back into the pervasive violence that we’d experienced in the years immediately following the U.S. invasion,it could become a new haven for terrorists to plot attacks against the United States. Iraqi’s stability thus, in my view, was not only ini raqS’ interest but ours. With that in mind, I privately and publicly advocated leaving behind a residual force that could provide training and security for Iraq’s military.
Michele Flournoy did her best to press that position, which reflected not just my views but also those of the military commanders in the region and the Joint Chiefs. But the president’s team at the White House pushed back, and the differences occasionally became heated. Flournoy argued our case, and those on our side of the debate viewed the White House as so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.
We debated with Maliki even as we debated among ourselves, with time running out. The clock wound down in December, and Ash Carter continued to argue our case, extending the deadline for the Iraqis to act, hoping that we might pull out a last-minute agreement and recognizing that once our forces left it would be essentially impossible for them to turn around and return. To my frustration, the White House coordinated the negotiations but never really led them. Officials there seemed content to endorse an agreement if State and Defense could reach one, but without the president’s active advocacy, Mailiki was allowed to slip away. The deal never materialized. To this day, I believe that a small, focused U.S. troop presence in Iraq could have effectively advised the Iraqi military on how to deal with Al Qaeda’s resurgence and the sectarian violence that has engulfed the country.
Over the course of the following two and a half years, the situation in Iraq slowly deteriorated.
Also on page 392 in Panetta’s book, is the following observation:
Privately, the various leadership factions in Iraq all confided that they wanted some U.S. forces to remain as a bulwark against sectarian violence. But none were willing to take that position publicly,
One of the excuses given by those defending President Obama’s failure to renegotiate the SoFA is that the Iraqis wanted us out. But there have been a number of officials who have made mention that in private confidence, Iraqis and Iraqi officials expressed the desire for U.S. forces to remain in Iraq for the sake of security.
May 4, 2007 in WaPo, foreign minister Zebari wrote:
Last weekend a traffic jam several miles long snaked out of the Mansour district in western Baghdad. The delay stemmed not from a car bomb closing the road but from a queue to enter the city’s central amusement park. The line became so long some families left their cars and walked to enjoy picnics, fairground rides and soccer, the Iraqi national obsession.
Across the city, restaurants are slowly filling and shops are reopening. The streets are busy. Iraqis are not cowering indoors. The appalling death tolls from suicide attacks are often high because of crowding at markets. These days you are as likely to hear complaints about traffic congestion as about the security situation. Across Baghdad there is a cacophony of sirens from ambulances, firefighters and police providing public services. You cannot even escape the curse of traffic wardens ticketing illegally parked cars.
These small but significant snippets of normality are overshadowed by acts of gross violence, which fuel the opinion of some that Iraq is in a downward spiral. The Iraqi people are indeed suffering tremendous hardships and making grave sacrifices — but daily life goes on for 7 million Baghdadis struggling to take back their capital and country.
~~~ So why should the world remain engaged in Iraq?
There is no denying the difficulties Iraq faces, and no amount of good news can obscure the demons of terrorism and sectarianism that have risen in my country. But there is too much at stake to risk failure, and everything to gain by helping us protect our hard-won democratic achievements and emerge as a stable, self-sustaining country.
~~~ Contrary to popular belief, most government ministries are located outside the Green Zone, and employees drive to work every day despite death threats and attacks on colleagues and families. We government ministers are always at risk of assassination. When a suicide bomber attacked parliament last month, the legislators sat in defiance in an extraordinary session the following day. I am particularly inspired by the commitment of the young diplomats in the Foreign Ministry, a diverse mix of Sunni, Shiite, Christian, Arab and Kurdish men and women who serve their country without subscribing to religious or sectarian divisions.
Iraqis are standing up every day, and we persevere because there is no other option. We will not surrender our country to terrorists. They have failed to cripple the elected government, and they have failed to intimidate us into submission. Iraqis reject their vision of a future whose hallmarks are bloodshed and hatred.
Those calling for withdrawal may think it is the least painful option, but its benefits would be short-lived. The fate of the region and the world is linked with ours. Leaving a broken Iraq in the Middle East would offer international terrorism a haven and ensure a legacy of chaos for future generations. Furthermore, the sacrifices of all the young men and women who stood up here would have been in vain.
Iraqis, for all our determination and courage, cannot succeed alone.
Premature withdrawal from a fragile Iraq that had just gotten over the hemorrhaging and slowly begun to heal made it vulnerable once again to the diseased violence that had inflicted it during the 4 years that succeeded the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to oust Saddam.
The downward, spiraling reversal of fortunes in Iraq was predictable….and preventable. A number of pundits warned of what may happen if we abandoned Iraq, prematurely.
When Megyn Kelly’s revival of a prescient warning that President Bush gave in 2007 made its rounds last September, the liberal response was:
1) We shouldn’t have been there [Iraq] in the first place
2) Bush signed SoFA and the Iraqis wanted us out, so current PotUS was powerless to do anything but throw his hands up in the air and play presidential bystander.
On point 2, I seem to recall reading that President Obama wanted President Bush to delay signing the SoFA. Ah, yes:
July 14, 2008: Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama meets with Maliki during his tour of the region. In a subsequent interview with Der Spiegel Magazine, Maliki is quoted as supporting Obama’s 16‐month withdrawal plan; 69 soon after the article is released, however, Maliki distances himself from perceptions that he is actively endorsing Obama. Another article discusses the possibility that during his visit Obama asked Iraqi negotiators to delay any security agreement until after the elections and a new administration was in place.
Here’s the original article by Amir Taheri:
WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.
“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview.
~~~ Obama has made many contradictory statements with regard to Iraq. His latest position is that US combat troops should be out by 2010. Yet his effort to delay an agreement would make that withdrawal deadline impossible to meet.
Supposing he wins, Obama’s administration wouldn’t be fully operational before February – and naming a new ambassador to Baghdad and forming a new negotiation team might take longer still.
By then, Iraq will be in the throes of its own campaign season. Judging by the past two elections, forming a new coalition government may then take three months. So the Iraqi negotiating team might not be in place until next June.
Then, judging by how long the current talks have taken, restarting the process from scratch would leave the two sides needing at least six months to come up with a draft accord. That puts us at May 2010 for when the draft might be submitted to the Iraqi parliament – which might well need another six months to pass it into law.
Thus, the 2010 deadline fixed by Obama is a meaningless concept, thrown in as a sop to his anti-war base.
Oh, my….this next part:
Iraqi leaders are divided over the US election. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (whose party is a member of the Socialist International) sees Obama as “a man of the Left” – who, once elected, might change his opposition to Iraq’s liberation. Indeed, say Talabani’s advisers, a President Obama might be tempted to appropriate the victory that America has already won in Iraq by claiming that his intervention transformed failure into success.
Maliki’s advisers have persuaded him that Obama will win – but the prime minister worries about the senator’s “political debt to the anti-war lobby” – which is determined to transform Iraq into a disaster to prove that toppling Saddam Hussein was “the biggest strategic blunder in US history.”
Other prominent Iraqi leaders, such as Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Kurdish regional President Massoud Barzani, believe that Sen. John McCain would show “a more realistic approach to Iraqi issues.”
Obama has given Iraqis the impression that he doesn’t want Iraq to appear anything like a success, let alone a victory, for America. The reason? He fears that the perception of US victory there might revive the Bush Doctrine of “pre-emptive” war – that is, removing a threat before it strikes at America.
Hmm, returning back to the allegation that Senator Obama was interfering with the SoFA negotiations….I seem to recall a couple of months back when a few Republican lawmakers led by Tom Cotton were being pilloried as traitors for penning a letter and “interfering” on the President’s Iran Nuclear negotiations.
Of course the fact that President Bush ended up being the one in office to sign the Status of Forces Agreement didn’t stop President Obama from riding the coattails and take credit for “ending the war in Iraq” and “bringing the troops home” when he had nothing to do with the arrangements in the deal negotiated before his watch.
To be fair though, the allegation of Senator Obama’s interference in September of 2008 is unconfirmed; and the senator denied the accusation:
WASHINGTON – Barack Obama said yesterday he didn’t urge Iraq to hold up an agreement with the Bush administration over the status of US troops serving in Iraq.
“Obama has never urged a delay in negotiations, nor has he urged a delay in immediately beginning a responsible drawdown of our combat brigades,” said Wendy Morigi, an Obama spokeswoman in response to a column in yesterday’s Post.
Morigi cited “outright distortions” in an column by Amir Taheri, but the Obama camp did not specifically dispute any of the quotes in the piece.
The article quoted Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari in an interview saying Obama said it might be better to delay an agreement.
“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said.
Zebari said Obama wanted congressional approval of a deal, and said it was better not to have the agreement negotiated while the administration was in a “state of weakness and political confusion.”
John McCain’s senior adviser, Randy Scheunemann, called Obama’s statements “an egregious act of political interference by a presidential candidate seeking political advantage overseas,” citing the “possibility” that Obama tried to undermine negotiations.
It does sound like something of the sort may have been insinuated by the presidential hopeful, based upon this.
It’s a bit of political excuse making on the part of Obama defenders to claim that SoFA made it impossible for President Obama to do anything other than to abide by the Agreement and withdraw troops from Iraq. He (and they) blame Bush for it in 2014-5; while having taken credit in 2011-2013. If the 2008 SoFA was binding and non-negotiable to being updated, then why did President Obama bother to try in the summer of 2011?
It was always the expectation that a renegotiation by the next administration would occur:
Former President George W. Bush’s administration signed an agreement in 2008 to withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, but policymakers in that administration always expected that agreement to be renegotiated to allow for an extension beyond that deadline, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told The Cable.
When President Barack Obama announced on Oct. 21 that he would withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by Dec. 31, his top advisors contended that since the Bush administration had signed the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), both administrations believed that all troops should be withdrawn by the end of the year. This was part of the Obama administration’s drive to de-emphasize their failed negotiations to renegotiate that agreement and frame the withdrawal as the fulfillment of a campaign promise to end the Iraq war.
~~~ Rice, speaking with The Cable to promote her new book No Higher Honor, said today that when the Bush administration signed the agreement, it was understood by both the U.S. and Iraqi governments that there would be follow-up negotiations aimed at extending the deadline — a step that would be in both the U.S. and Iraqi interest.
“There was an expectation that we would negotiate something that looked like a residual force for our training with the Iraqis,” Rice said. “Everybody believed it would be better if there was some kind of residual force.”
Rice said the Iraqi government, despite SOFA’s Jan. 2012 end date, was not only open to a new agreement that would include an extension for U.S. troops, but expected that a new agreement would eventually be signed.
Max Boot linked in a most wanted in Oct 2011:
Friday afternoon is a traditional time to bury bad news, so at 12:49 p.m. on Oct. 21 President Obama strode into the White House briefing room to “report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year—after nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.” He acted as though this represented a triumph, but it was really a defeat. The U.S. had tried to extend the presence of our troops past Dec. 31. Why did we fail?
The popular explanation is that the Iraqis refused to provide legal immunity for U.S. troops if they are accused of breaking Iraq’s laws. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself said: “When the Americans asked for immunity, the Iraqi side answered that it was not possible. The discussions over the number of trainers and the place of training stopped. Now that the issue of immunity was decided and that no immunity to be given, the withdrawal has started.”
But Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi political figures expressed exactly the same reservations about immunity in 2008 during the negotiation of the last Status of Forces Agreement. Indeed those concerns were more acute at the time because there were so many more U.S. personnel in Iraq—nearly 150,000, compared with fewer than 50,000 today. So why was it possible for the Bush administration to reach a deal with the Iraqis but not for the Obama administration?
Quite simply it was a matter of will: President Bush really wanted to get a deal done, whereas Mr. Obama did not. Mr. Bush spoke weekly with Mr. Maliki by video teleconference. Mr. Obama had not spoken with Mr. Maliki for months before calling him in late October to announce the end of negotiations. Mr. Obama and his senior aides did not even bother to meet with Iraqi officials at the United Nations General Assembly in September.
The administration didn’t even open talks on renewing the Status of Forces Agreement until this summer, a few months before U.S. troops would have to start shuttering their remaining bases to pull out by Dec. 31. The previous agreement, in 2008, took a year to negotiate.
The recent negotiations were jinxed from the start by the insistence of State Department and Pentagon lawyers that any immunity provisions be ratified by the Iraqi parliament—something that the U.S. hadn’t insisted on in 2008 and that would be almost impossible to get today. In many other countries, including throughout the Arab world, U.S. personnel operate under a Memorandum of Understanding that doesn’t require parliamentary ratification. Why not in Iraq? Mr. Obama could have chosen to override the lawyers’ excessive demands, but he didn’t.
Another point that Obama defenders use to excuse failure to renegotiate SoFA is the idea that the Obama Administration tried, but the Iraqis would not budge on the immunity issue for our troops; and a vote left up to parliament would never pass.
Peter Feaver at Shadow Government back in November 2014 questioned whether an Iraqi parliamentary vote on troop immunity was truly at issue:
a successful negotiation would have strengthened the U.S.-Iraq partnership, giving the United States more leverage over Maliki and thus helping dissuade his more pernicious choices. Certainly Maliki was better behaved when U.S. troops were in country than he was when he was left alone. And the troops would have greatly improved our intelligence picture, and thus the warning of the rise of the Islamic State (IS), and probably would have improved the initial Iraqi efforts to block IS’s advance.
However you come down on the counterfactual, it is clear that the Obama administration now believes that 3,000 troops can make a difference.
All of this is important, but there is another disturbing question left hanging by the current immunity situation. How much of the original rationale for giving up on a stay-behind force was driven by the immunity issue and how much was driven by political considerations related to Obama’s reelection campaign? As things played out in 2011, it fit a convenient presidential narrative that Obama would end our wars and bring our troops home. Campaign strategists could spin this “Obama-ended-the-war” story to help the president win re-election. Well, the war in Iraq has not ended (actually, it never did for the Iraqis) and our troops are back in the country — but without the immunity protections Obama claimed were essential.
So the question remains: Why have President Obama and his advisors changed their minds on the necessity of having immunity for our troops?
was one of 40 conservative foreign policy professionals who wrote to Obama in September to warn that even a residual force of 4,000 troops would “leave the country more vulnerable to internal and external threats, thus imperiling the hard-fought gains in security and governance made in recent years at significant cost to the United States.”
She said that the administration’s negotiating strategy was flawed for a number of reasons: it failed to take into account Iraqi politics, failed to reach out to a broad enough group of Iraqi political leaders, and sent contradictory messages on the troop extension throughout the process.
“From the beginning, the talks unfolded in a way where they largely driven by domestic political concerns, both in Washington and Baghdad. Both sides let politics drive the process, rather than security concerns,” said Sullivan.
As recently as August, Maliki’s office was discussing allowing 8,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops to remain until next year, Iraqi Ambassador Samir Sumaida’ie said in an interview with The Cable. He told us that there was widespread support in Iraq for such an extension, but the Obama administration was demanding that immunity for U.S. troops be endorsed by the Iraqi Council of Representatives, which was never really possible.
Administration sources and Hill staffers also tell The Cable that the demand that the troop immunity go through the Council of Representatives was a decision made by the State Department lawyers and there were other options available to the administration, such as putting the remaining troops on the embassy’s diplomatic rolls, which would automatically give them immunity.
“An obvious fix for troop immunity is to put them all on the diplomatic list; that’s done by notification to the Iraqi foreign ministry,” said one former senior Hill staffer. “If State says that this requires a treaty or a specific agreement by the Iraqi parliament as opposed to a statement by the Iraqi foreign ministry, it has its head up its ass.”
~~~ “There was a misunderstanding of how negotiations were unfolding in Iraq. The negotiations got started in earnest far too late.”
“The actions don’t match the words here,” said Sullivan. “It’s in the administration’s interest to make this look not like they failed to reach an agreement and that they fulfilled a campaign promise. But it was very clear that Panetta and [former Defense Secretary Robert] Gates wanted an agreement.”
So what’s the consequence of the failed negotiations? One consequence could be a security vacuum in Iraq that will be filled by Iran.
~~~ “Multiple experts have testified before my committee that the Iraqis still lack important capacities in their ability to maintain their internal stability and territorial integrity,” McKeon said. “These shortcomings could reverse the decade of hard work and sacrifice both countries have endured to build a free Iraq.”
Follow up interview by Josh Rogin with Condoleeza Rice in November 2011:
FP: The immunity that you negotiated did not go through the Iraqi parliament, right? That was an executive-to-executive agreement right?
CR: Exactly. I don’t know enough to know whether or not that option was available, but it would have been a preferable option.… I think it would have been preferable to have trainers, but you need to maintain a military-to-military relationship in any case.
FP: And just to be clear, there was an expectation that there would be renegotiation for another extension that was understood by both sides?
CR: We certainly understood that the Iraqis reserved that option, and everybody believed that option was going to be exercised.
Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker:
—it seems possible that, if Obama had pushed Maliki harder, the United States could have retained a small force of soldiers there in noncombat roles. More than a few Americans and Iraqis told me this. They blame Obama for not trying harder. “You just had this policy vacuum and this apathy,” Michael Barbero, the commander of American forces in Iraq in 2011, told me, describing the Obama White House.
Barbero on CNN with Wolf Blitzer
BLITZER: You were on active duty in Iraq, 2010, 2011 when they were trying to negotiate that Status of Forces –
BARBERO: Right.
BLITZER: — Agreement that would have left a residual force, 5,000 or 10,000 U.S. troops, but you couldn’t get immunity from Nuri al Maliki’s government. Take us behind the scenes, clarify, who’s right, John McCain or Jay Carney, in this debate.
BARBERO: Well, in the summer of 2010, prepared a briefing, I was responsible for Iraqi security forces, and took it to all the Iraqi leaders, Maliki, the other Shia leaders, the Sunnis, the Kurds, and said here is going to be the status of your security forces, what they cannot do, what they will be able to do, when we’re schedule to leave. And to a man they said, well, general, you must stay. And my response was, you must make it easy for us. So I think Maliki did not make it easy for us and we did not try hard enough. So it’s a — both views. I think it could have been done though.
BLITZER: Because the U.S. — the Pentagon position was, 5,000 to 10,000 U.S. troops staying –
BARBERO: Right.
BLITZER: For an indefinite amount of time.
BARBERO: Right.
BLITZER: But you wanted immunity from prosecution as part of the status of forces agreement. What happened then because the White House says Nuri al Maliki wouldn’t give that immunity to any residual U.S. force.
BARBERO: I think we could have worked it and kept it from going through the parliament. I think we could have – we have immunity today, it didn’t go through the parliament. So I think it could have been worked if we had tried harder.
BLITZER: You don’t think the administration tried hard enough to get it?
BARBERO: I don’t think so.
BLITZER: That’s the McCain position, that could have been done but the White House didn’t want it to be done. They wanted all U.S. troops.
BARBERO: I don’t think we tried hard enough.
BLITZER: You think it was – it was definitely doable.
BARBERO: I think it was.
BLITZER: There was another argument that the Pentagon wanted 5,000 to 10,000 U.S. troops to remain.
BARBERO: Right.
BLITZER: The White House said maybe 1,000 or 2,000 for a year and the Iraqis said well that’s not good enough.
BARBERO: Right. No, and –
BLITZER: Was – is that true?
BARBERO: That is true. And we wanted them pulled back on these training sites where we’re fielding military equipment to train the Iraqi, not in any kind of combat role at all.
Barbero isn’t the only military commander who has expressed the belief that we could have and should have kept a force presence in Iraq.
Shadow Government, Dec 13, 2011:
The Obama administration is attempting to cast the Iraq war as a triumph of the president’s vision for American foreign policy. As a candidate, he promised to bring this war to an end, and as president he’s done so. It also conveniently fits into the Obama campaign’s general narrative that President Obama inherited problems of Herculean magnitude.
But, in fact, the Iraq war was on a glide path to conclusion at the end of the Bush administration: the increased troop commitment of the surge and its accompanying counterinsurgency tactics had succeeded in breaking the dynamic of insurgent success; it had concluded the Strategic Framework Agreement with Iraq that the Obama administration is now taking such credit for.
What remained to be done when the Obama administration took office was implementing the agreement in ways that strengthened the practices and institutions of democracy in Iraq, incentivized non-sectarian political cooperation, continued confidence-building measures (especially along the Kurdish fault lines), reassured Iraq both of their sovereignty and our continuing involvement, and fostered support for Iraq among U.S. allies in the region.
What the Obama administration achieved instead is a faster end to U.S. military involvement in Iraq, but one that undercut the political objectives it remains in American interest to attain. Iraqis may achieve those things despite our policies, but they are not achieving them because of our policies. On that President Obama deserves to be held account.
The administration claimed it was committed to a “responsible withdrawal” from Iraq. But their policies of establishing deadlines unconnected to the progress of our war aims, inattention to political developments within Iraq, and unwillingness to acknowledge he increasing repressiveness of the Maliki government have shown the administration’s emphasis on withdrawal rather than responsibility.
~~~ If no troops in Iraq is the metric for success, then President Obama has led us to success in the Iraq war. But if capitalizing on the gains won by our military to nurture an Iraq that is more than a Shi-ia autocracy leaning toward Iran, President Obama has merely conceded our political aims in order to get our troops out.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMPHvB0lTSo[/youtube]
Of course, what is more important than “what if” questions for hypothetical answers about “Was Iraq a mistake?” “If you knew then what you know now ….?” is the very real-time question: What is our president doing today to stop ISIS?
Was December of 2011 his “mission accomplished” moment?
Bush has been out of office for 6 years. Syria. Isis. Iraq today…these are all happening on Obama’s watch .
ISIS- that JV Team of junior jihadis- that’s on him. Not Bush.
This is not a failure of Bush leadership: It’s 100% Obama:
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce made the stunning revelation in a congressional hearing last week that Iraq had been urgently requesting drone support against the Islamic State since August 2013 and that those requests were repeatedly turned down.
Obama officials have publicly claimed that Iraq requested air support only in May of this year, after Islamic State had already taken Fallujah and was marching on Mosul. That is untrue. And it is Royce’s version of events that is borne out by the public record. On Aug. 17, 2013, in a little-noticed story entitled “Iraq Open to U.S. Drone Strikes on Terrorists,” Bloomberg News reported that Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari was in Washington “seeking U.S. advisers, air surveillance or even drone strikes” and that “the top Iraqi diplomat’s comments are the first time he has publicly raised the possibility of working with the U.S. on anti-terrorist drone strikes.”
Marc Thiessen’s current column:
Jeb Bush’s fumbled answer on Iraq is so troubling because the controversy is so unnecessary. The only people in the United States obsessed with re-litigating the 2003 decision to invade Iraq are on the left. Most Americans are far more concerned about what the next president is going to do about Iraq today.
A former fetus, the “wordsmith from nantucket” was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. Adopted at birth, wordsmith grew up a military brat. He achieved his B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (graduating in the top 97% of his class), where he also competed rings for the UCLA mens gymnastics team. The events of 9/11 woke him from his political slumber and malaise. Currently a personal trainer and gymnastics coach.
The wordsmith has never been to Nantucket.
These are really useful posts. I wish I could strap liberals into chairs and force them to read them, sort of like you see on Robot Chicken.
What an excellent post.
Although long, every point was necessary to understanding fully what and when things went on.
Only recently Obama openly wished he could control the news.
If he could just prevent all this from being published in the 1st place, he’s look so much better.
Sometimes I think optics is all that concerns Obama.
He actually went to the major news outlets and berated them for showing ”stock footage” of ISIS parading around in broad daylight with weapons.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/isil-islamic-state-obama-administration-television-networks-footage-117911.html
I don’t know how many of the alphabet networks stopped using those 5 month old scenes, but ISIS just gave the world brand new footage from Ramadi.
So much for Obama controlling the news.
Obama tried every trick in the book to look like he won…..he said he wanted a new SoFA, then he said he was stuck with Bush’s SoFA.
Now he’s blaming Bush. Maliki, Republicans, the media….anyone but himself.
But the Washington Post’s Editorial Board came out today with this:
The fall of Ramadi exposes Obama’s weak Islamic State strategy
One of the worst things about Obama’s handling of all this war in the ME is how he forces our troops to fight at a disadvantage against Muslim fighters or every stripe.
They had to go one-on-one in hand-to-hand combat to kill that ISIS leader just the other day, for example.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/16/abu-sayyaf-raid-required-us-troops-to-use-hand-to-/
WHY?
With all our weapons and abilities, why?
Maliki was re-elected PM only because Al Sadr gave him the needed vote. Sadr would never have allowed a SOFA to be signed and HE was the kingmaker in Iraq. Maliki was PM only because Sadr allowed it. Bush handpicked Maliki and he turned out to be corrupt and allied with Iran. Bush had to sign the SOFA that said we would leave Iraq forced him to because THEY DID NOT WANT US THERE. Not then not now. Iraq was the biggest failure of the USA . It destabilized an unstable region and now we are seeing a macro Shia?Sunni war. Who should we support ?? The wahabist saudi Sunnis who were al Qaeda and are now ISIS? Or the Iranian Shia? The Israelis are backing teh Sunnis, does this mean we should? I say no. Posters here want a “stronger” policy against ISIS? they must want us to d more than just the air support we are flying for the (Iranian) militias that are the only ones fighting ISIS. Maybe they want American boots on the ground fighting alongside the Iranians? The Iraqi Shia army is a bad joke they will not fight ISIS after 30 billion (about 1 million$ training for each of the “30,000” Iraqi soldiers) they refuse to fight, and now after 10+ years of training they are not only untrained but 1/2 way to retirement with a pension!
Nan the reason we went into Syria on that raid was to capture intel including human, it wasn’t to kill one guy.
Baghdad has been an Iran proxy ever since democracy came to Iraq with the fall of Saddam. The majority of iraqis like Iran more than the USA. The ones that don’t are the Sunnis and they would rather support ISIS than Baghdad.
The same people that were driving the GOP clown car that steered the US into this mess now think they have all the right answers on how to fix it up.
“Knowing what we now know about Iran………” would you value anyone’s opinion who didn’t see these major problems/civil war beginning TEN FREAKIN YEARS AGO
My fav post from way back then was Curt’s one about the 4 women who opened the coffee shop in Basra.
At this point may of 2010 ISIS/AQI was already 5 years old and growing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq
And for a look back at what we all were thinking 5 years ago let’s take a look at what we all were saying back then when some were still seeing nothing but blue skies and a wonderful future for Iraq
IF that were true, don’t you think it was pretty stupid to publicize that we captured family, slaves, phones and computers off the guy we killed?
How fast do you think ISIS can retool every code word, every operation they had planned and every way to contact one another?
Intel has NO value if the enemy knows we have it!
Thanks, Obama!
@John:
And one of my replies to you on that thread:
Note the sarcasm-drip? Your fixation and distorted mentality over the nature and spirit of that post is simply bizarre. Just as it would be if you picked out other posts that highlighted some of the good we were doing over there; or success gains on a personal level, like soldiers interacting in a positive manner with Iraqi locals.
By the time George Bush handed the presidential baton over to Barack Obama, how was the security situation in Iraq in comparison to 2004-2007? The casualty count?
And from 2011- present….how is it now? And who sits in the Oval Office?
So PolitiFact consulted two guys for their “expert analysis”- Austin Long, a Columbia University international and public affairs professor; and Christopher Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.
They really need to look deeper or survey a wider berth of “expert” opinion.
@DrJohn: Well, here’s your first opportunity. You won’t find a more worthy subject.
@John:
@Nanny G: They haven’t even bothered to mine the data from the bin Laden raid.
Why did the Bush administration establish a timetable for withdraw that could only be altered with the consent of al Maliki’s government to begin with?
It was known at the time that public sentiment in Iraq would make any subsequent extension of the U.S. military presence a political impossibility. Once withdrawal dates were established, no Iraqi leader would be able agree to such an extension and remain in power.
I think the answer requires a level of cynicism about American politics that doesn’t sit well with most people.
@Greg:
Who was the agreement supposed to be with? Of course, certainly Bush never anticipated such an inept, weak and uninterested party would take the success he left them and would not be able to convince Maliki of what it in his best interest. No doubt he never expected Obama to mismanage it into a disaster.
Known by whom? I know Wordsmith’s presentation has a lot of words in it, but they are all worthy of reading; you SHOULD read them. Then you would realize what faulty logic it is to continue to believe in the liars you have relied on.
You are not capable of being cynical of anyone not liberal. All your arguments, past and present, have been laid to rubble by these articles; where you should direct your cynicism is towards those that have been lying to you.
Word- Excellent post and details, complete with backup documentation.
As much as the historical and factually challenged left tries to blame Bush for Obama’s decision to not renew the SOFA, even taking the SOFA out of the picture, Obama had been warned repeatedly by Iraq, the Kurds, and his own intel about the ISIS threat. He blew off the Kurds and Iraqi government when they first went to him for support back in the day when ISIS was nowhere near entrenched in Iraq which would have made them a lot easier to defeat. Here is the warning from DoD about ISIS. Page 70 is where the severity of the threat is discussed. It’s pretty straightforward when words like “dire” and “grave” are used. Perhaps they don’t have any dictionaries in the WH. As an added bonus, remember when the lefties came here swearing up and down that NO weapons went from the port in Benghazi to Syria? Well page 4 shows exactly how much they knew about that little matter as well. Don’t expect any of them to have the honesty, integrity, or honor to admit their assertions were wrong.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/interactive/2015/05/18/defense-department-documents-given-to-judicial-watch-under-foia-suit/
@Bill, #9:
Known by anyone paying attention to the news. Here’s an article that appeared in Democracy Arsenal on October 21, 2008:
So, it was recognized before the SOFA was finalized—at least by observers outside the Bush administration—that the terms of the agreement would deprive the United States of any likelihood of extending the withdrawal deadlines through future renegotiation. That’s precisely what the article was saying.
@Greg:
You know, Gullible Greggie, you have an amazing ability to find the most radical left wing sites on the internet. Of course you didn’t mention that your referenced article is also a contributor to Huffington Post, another radical left wing site.
But then, I noticed that you did not link to the finalized SoFA, just a commentary by a radical left winger about a unofficial SoFA, and not really the SoFA, just your radical left winger’s take on it.
I have given up on you. You’re an idiot and it seems you will remain an idiot until the end of your days.
Who said this?
Army General John M. Keane in June of 2014:
The October 2008 article was precisely on target. The terms of the SOFA locked the U.S. into a withdrawal timetable that could only be extended with the full consent of the Iraqi government. Internal politics in Iraq made it a virtual certainty that such consent would never be given.
Here you go: The full text of the signed SOFA. The problem that the article cited remained in the final version that was signed on November 17, 2008. (Refer to Article 30, #2.) The facts that the article cites are neither left nor right. They’re simply facts.
Renegotiation? The al Maliki government would consider allowing us to remain longer only if Iraqi civil courts had legal jurisdiction over U.S. personnel. He knew full well that the Obama administration wouldn’t agree. Al Maliki used this as a means to prevent any successful renegotiation while pretending to negotiate.
@Greg:
But, but….wait………….. haven’t you left wingers been telling us that the Light Bringer, Obama, is the most intelligent, capable man to every prop his feet up on the Resolution Desk? Didn’t you, and your ilk, say how much more competent he was than George Bush?
So that leaves you with only two options, Gullible Greggie:
a) Obama did not want to renegotiate the SoFA because of his campaign promise which led to present day Iraq or
b) he is totally incompetent and could not pull off a new SoFA.
So which is it?
Anyone who you leftists think is so much smarter than George Bush is should have at least been able to get the same SoFA, which did not permit the Iraqis prosecuting U.S. personnel. Obama couldn’t even do that.
Well, it’s OK because the greatest threat to the world is not ISIS; it is global warming… that hasn’t happened for 18 years.
This explains why Obama ignored the threat of a resurgence of terrorism in Iraq and pulled all the troops out.. so they can defend against global warming.
Every day, Obama proves and re-proves that he is the least capable person on the planet to be President of this country.
Nevertheless, Greg, had Obama the intelligence or the humility to pay heed to experts that know things military instead of thinking that unless he thinks of the solution, there IS no solution. Obama took a victory in Iraq and the hope for peace and democracy and converted it into defeat, failure and threat. He didn’t even try.
@Bill: You and all the naysayers here have it all wrong. This is what REALLY happened the last six years. Ask any leftist.
Saddam Hussein didn’t have any WMD.
Saddam Hussein didn’t have any ties to terrorism.
Saddam Hussein was in complete compliance with all of the U.N. Resolutions.
In 2011, President Bush’s generals in Iraq, his SecDef Leon Panetta, and his Sec. of State Hillary Clinton all urged him to keep troops in Iraq in order to continue to stabilize the country.
In 2012, President Bush ignored DoD warnings that ISIS posed a grave threat to Iraq and that the situation was dire.
In 2013, President Bush ignored requests for help by the Iraqi’s and Kurds to defeat ISIS.
In January, 2014 President Bush called ISIS a JV team.
AQ has been decimated and is near defeat.
AQ and its affiliates control less territory now than they did in 2008 making the world much safer.
Libya was a foreign policy masterpiece.
No arms went from the port of Benghazi to Syria.
The Benghazi attack was the result of a video.
The reason for the unemployment rate dropping to 5.4% is because of the millions of full time jobs created.
No one lost their health insurance because of Obamacare.
No one saw their insurance premiums go up because of Obamacare.
The earth has never been hotter in its 4.5 billion years of existence than it is now.
Climate change didn’t exist prior to the last century.
Well, you get the picture. When looking at facts through the eyes of the left, Ricardo Montablan said it perfectly. “Welcome to fantasy island.”
@Greg: All the counter-points to your position can be found within this post. Why should I rehash when you can simply scroll back up?
The one point they were hung up on in negotiations was the issue of troop immunity. The ones I’ve linked to absolutely contest that troop immunity was possible and that Team Obama simply didn’t push hard enough; or have enough personal interest in dealing with Maliki or Iraq. You always talk about the 2008 SoFA “locking into a withdrawal timetable” and have claimed in the past that President Obama’s hands were tied. Yet, why would he even bother attempting to renegotiate the terms, if that were the case? It was in fact not the case. Did you hear President Obama complain back in 2011, “Oh, I really want to leave a sizable troop presence in Iraq for national security interests; but gosh, darn it, Bush made this impossible by ‘ending the war in Iraq’ and signing the date for ‘bringing our troops home'”?
@Bill:
I heard some of his speech to Coast Guard graduates during my drive to work, on the radio. Did I hear him right or is it my ODS kicking in? Did I hear him sort of blame terrorism trends on climate change?!
Ok, I looked it up. Phew, I guess my ODS did filter his words through my BS meter and made me hear it worse than it actually was (and I think it’s pretty bad):
Phew, that’s where I misheard him! Uh oh, wait a sec….”but” monkey coming up:
Hmmm……so climate change contributes to a terrorist fertile environment?
Hillary Clinton and the StFU- er, i mean the SoFA (reported by center-right Jennifer Rubin in WaPo, June 26, 2014):
@Wordsmith:
Which brings us to this point: if the Obama administration believed that the SoFA was so cast in stone that it could not be renegotiated, why were there any negotiations by the Obama administration in the first place? If the SoFA was so cast in stone that it could not be changed, the only action required of the Obama administration, at that point, was to simply fulfill the terms of the SoFA. No renegotiations necessary.
The truth of the matter is that Obama made renegotiations so impossible that the Iraqi government would not go along. Maliki said “I don’t know how to sell this” meaning that the Obama administration negotiations were so vague and so lame that he had nothing to take to his parliament. Obama was hung up on a legal issue that he seemed to throw out the window when that legal issue became inconvenient.
Obama’s only concern was pandering to his anti-war left wing faction for the purpose of re-election. He was not trying to look into the future of Iraq, although he was being advised by our military leaders that Iraq was still perched precariously on a tight rope and could fall on either side if we did not maintain a residual force. Obama’s pandering has proven to give us the predictable results as ISIS marches across Iraq and how now taken the historic Syrian city of Palmyra.
Obama did not want to be a “war-time” president, concentrating only on domestic issues, which are also a disaster. The Middle East, particularly Iraq, Syria and Libya, are failures of Obama’s foreign policy. The ramifications to the United States will be long.
@Wordsmith:
OH, yeah, you heard him right; the warming that stopped 18 years ago, the rising oceans that are not rising, the increased frequency and intensity of storms that are not increasing in either, the disappearance of polar ice which is more abundant than it has been in decades… all these catastrophes that only liberals with their glasses with special lenses can see are causing terrorism and ISIS.
Yep, that’s what he said, alright. One wonders, though, exactly what is the Coast Guard supposed to do about it? And are we ordering more naval vessels to patrol the larger oceans?
@retire05, #16:
Nope. That’s only what the right claims is being said, any time someone on the left points out that Obama isn’t actually the anti-Christ.
@Greg:
So which is it, Gullible Greggie?
a) did Obama try to renegotiate a SoFA so cast in stone that there was nothing for him to renegotiate (at which point you have to ask why he even bothered and simply met the terms negotiated by the Bush administration)
b) he really hampered renegotiations because he wanted desperately to get out of Iraq and claim victory because, at the time, it was looking good or
c) he is so inept that he was incapable of persuading the Iraqis to accept his ideas?
Not that I expect you to answer the question because you are the master of obfuscation and will never directly answer a question. You only continue to prove what a sad hack you really are.
As to Obama being the anti-Christ, nope. I doubt that even the Devil would want to claim someone as incompetent as Obama.
@Greg: Yeah, after 6 1/2 years of a continuous demonstration of the ineptitude, stupidity, corruption and lying of “the Harvard genius”, you should begin backing off of that one.
Ineptitude? Obama has kept things on track despite an opposition party that can’t agree among themselves on much of anything, other than the need to oppose Barack Obama. They can’t consistently cooperate among themselves to that end, either.
What have they accomplished over the past 6 1/2 years, even after attaining majorities in both houses of Congress? Other than unnecessary and costly government shutdowns, driving up the cost of the national debt, shutting down women’s health clinics wholesale, and running an endless series of politically motivated investigations that have yet to produce evidence of anything that they alleged to start with…
I’m guessing they’ll either tear themselves to shreds when the campaign gets into full swing, or spend all of their time attacking Hillary Clinton while avoiding taking firm positions on anything controversial. They will all favor more tax cuts, of course, in between rants about the rising national debt.
@Greg:
Wow! I’m impressed, Gullible Greggie. You have those left wing talking points down pat. But let’s take them one by one:
Shall we go back in time and discuss whose idea sequestration was? No? I didn’t think so.
Amazing. And how things change depending on which party controls the Oval Office. Now, I remember how you on the left whined and moaned that it was George W. Bush driving up the national debt. But it seems now that the talking point has changed, and it is now the party that was NOT in power until recently, who drove up the national debt. Interesting how the liberal mind works.
God forbid that Planned Parenthood, a supposedly 501(c)3 organization but who makes millions of $$ a year, should not be able to continue with its wholesale slaughter of babies. Nothin’ says lovin’ like killing your unborn child, right?
Well, we do know that Charlene Lamb denied the Benghazi consulate the requested security, or have you forgotten that she worked for the Hildabeast at the time?
But then, no surprise that you didn’t answer the questions I posed to you. Continuing to prove that not only are you an idiot, but you are not good for anything but to pimp for the left wing. Tell me, Gullible Greggie, what does it feel like to sell your soul?
@retire05, #28:
I notice you you don’t seem to have compiled a list of recent GOP accomplishments.
With the plethora of dire issues they’ve been yapping about for the past 6 1/2 years, surely the party holding majorities in both Houses of Congress has come up with something in the way of a genuinely useful, constructive legislative initiative. Perhaps I’ve missed it.
They’re always attacking Obama’s approach to ISIS. Maybe they’ve come up with detailed suggestions of their own?
OK, Teddy boy. You’re wearing long pants now. All evidence to the contrary, you seem to think you’re smarter than the man in the Oval Office. So what exactly are you recommending? What, exactly, have any of them recommended?
Good Lord.
Maybe Jeb has an idea?
If that’s not clear enough, there’s this.
@Greg: http://gop.gov/bills-by-congress/
Quite a contrast to Hobblin’ Harry and his authority to block anything and everything that comes along, then have his idiotic mouthpieces come forth and blame Republicans (of course, I mean others other than YOU, Greg.
You are aware (perhaps not), aren’t you, that this administration actually has no strategy, admits as much and just had a conference to try and come up with one, right? Obama wants to solve “global warming”, as if it actually exists and it actually has some influence on the spread of terrorism since he turned a blind eye to it all.
Obama should have kept 10,000 or more troops in Iraq. Everyone with intelligence told him so. He knew better, though, didn’t he? Worked out great.
@Greg:
I think you have me confused with yourself. I am not a parrot for the GOP. As a matter of fact, I think the GOP leadership is a disgrace. Boehner and McConnell both need to retire. The difference between them and the Pelosi/Reid cabal is that Boehner and McConnell are just stupid. Pelosi/Reid are pure evil Marxists.
Cruz and Rubio? Gee, what is that? 2% of the Senate? And since when it is the responsibility of the Senate to formulate military tactics? Seems to me there is a reason the President is called “Commander in Chief.” Seems to me the Joint Chiefs of Staff work for the President. It is, and has always been, the President’s responsibility to create military tactics. Or have you forgotten how FDR micromanaged WWII?
Ramadi just fell to ISIS. And how did Obama respond? He called it a “set back.” Does that give you any idea of just how incompetent Obama is?
Perhaps you would like to explain Obama’s “strategy”? Because basically it seems his only strategy is to allow the entire Middle East to explode.
And you remain an idiot.
@Greg:
Hmm….
Special Ops to Obama: Let Us Fight ISIS, Already:
@wordsmith:
Your #32 is a very insightful comment, Wordsmith.
I would note that a few EX-military men are going off to fight ISIS on their own!
So far I have heard it is just a few, about 2 dozen.
But I would add a slight defense to Obama’s actions with regard sending more fighters.
Demographics.
In the USA we have only two demographic population bumps for males: one where they are between 50 and 59.
The other where they are between 20 and 24.
29% of our population is so young it is dependent on adults for care.
21% of our population is so old it, too, is dependent on adults to care for them!
That comes to a 50% population dependent on the bulk of adults.
17% of adults are unemployed.
The USA is also deeply in population shrinkage.
It takes a 1.05 population growth rate to equal a zero population rate (because of deaths before reaching adulthood).
But the USA is at only 0.77 population growth (shrinkage) rate!
We tend to value something that is rare.
People are only having one child.
They don’t want to toss them into war.
Compare that with the high population rates where ISIS has made contraception illegal and abortion illegal.
All the kidnapped girls recently freed by ISIS Boko Haram arm were heavily pregnant!
ALL of them!
Not only can they afford to throw their fighters into battle, but with 17,000 European and North American fighters joining in, they’ve got plenty of cannon fodder.
Obama limited our fighters to a level playing field in Sryia recently.
He is afraid of the optics of fighting so as to win, from the air.
He is afraid of the PR machine of Islamic women and children on BBC and PBS.
He is paralyzed by that fear.
We will lose until he is gone.
@retire05, #31:
Nobody said it was the responsibility of the Senate. However, if you happen to be a Senator who claims to be qualified for the job of president, and you’re constantly attacking the policy and tactics of the person who has actually been performing the job of Commander in Chief for 6 1/2 years during very challenging times, it’s necessary for you to explain what you would be doing differently.
Someone should explain to Senator Cruz and other aspirants to the presidency that attacking anything and everything Obama does or says does not itself constitute a coherent foreign or domestic policy. Repeatedly shouting “You’re doing it wrong!” is not evidence that you could do something better.
@Greg:
Then someone should have told Obama that “hope and change” is NOT a policy.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, saving General Motors from collapse, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, the new Start Treaty, the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, and the removal of restrictions on stem cell research would be examples of policy in action. So would the development of LED light bulbs, which use only 15 percent as much energy as incandescent bulbs while lasting 40 times longer.
Like it or not, he has actually tried to do much of what he talked about when he was campaigning for president. That’s why a lot of people who voted for him the first time did so a second time.
@Greg:
So you believe that watching my insurance premiums go from $0 to over $300 a month is a benefit? How so? And how much money did it cost in taxpayer dollars for a horrible, dysfunctional website that pimp the ACA?
Being the clueless “Never had a business of my own” fellow you are, you think Dodd-Frank is a success. Why don’t you ask those small businesses that can no longer get operating loans if it is a success.
Saving General Motors? Why don’t you call it what it was; saving the UAW? Chrysler now belongs to Fiat, an Italian company and GM is off shoring as fast as it can. Another success in your book.
As to those light bulbs; why don’t you tell me your town’s regulations, that comply with federal regulations, on how you have to dispose those light bulbs when they go dark?
It seems you are as dim as the light bulbs you support.
@Greg: Hey, Greg… WE’RE supposed to be the people pointing out the massive and endless record of failure of Barack Hussein Obama. Not you.
But, nice job nonetheless.
If someone can’t grasp the fact that LED bulbs producing the same amount of light using only 15 percent of the energy and lasting 40 times as long as incandescent lights are far better not just for an individual, but for an energy hungry nation of consisting of over 318 million individuals, I don’t imagine any light bulbs will be turning on above their heads any time soon.
Any businesses that want to cut their annual lighting costs will figure out that green lighting is no scam. It saves a lot of energy, which translates to saving a lot of money. Their lead, arsenic, nickel, and copper contents could be reduced if regulation requires it. Meanwhile, LEDs are reducing environmental contamination by reducing the amount of coal that must be burned to generate electricity. Coal ash contains high levels of arsenic, lead, and selenium. It releases mercury directly into the atmosphere. If that weren’t enough, coal contains traces of various radioactive elements which remain in coal ash. While the concentrations of radioactive elements are low, the volumes of ash are very high, and nobody has figured out how to safely get rid of it.
@Greg:
Well then, let’s just face it… they AREN’T better. They don’t last “40 times” the life of an incandescent…. often they don’t last as long as an incandescent. I had a pile of about 15 of them, wondering what to do with them (you can’t throw mercury into the garbage, Greg) until I found out Lowes and Home Depot takes them. I began marking the installation date on the base and found many times they last only about 6 months…. and these are the GE bulbs (though probably made in the same Chinese factory as any other.
They cost much more, but they don’t last. Yet another green failure.
Coal is yet another liberal boogey-man the left loves to use in their fear-tactic, demagogueing, misinformation campaign. Coal has been cleaned up greatly, is cheap, plentiful and HERE.
Silly and weak, Greg. Silly and weak.
CFL technology is probably transitional. It’s more efficient than incandescent bulbs for many household lighting applications, but it’s nowhere as good as LEDs. I’ve had 2 or 3 compact fluorescent bulbs burn out prematurely since I’ve been buying them. Probably manufacturing defects are to blame. I’ve had one that was DOA straight out of the package. I suspect they don’t do well in enclosed fixtures where heat builds up. I’ve been replacing them with LEDs. LED retail costs have dropped dramatically, but you still have to hunt around to find the good prices. A few will be faulty. They’re more complex than incandescent lights, which are basically nothing more than a heating filament in a glass bulb. There are new higher efficiency incandescent bulbs that will remain available as long as people want them. They don’t seem to cost much more in the discount stores than the old-style bulbs. They run a few watts lower than what they’ve replaced.
Aldis grocery stores have changed over to LED lights on the large scale. They’re in business to make money. They tend to quickly figure out what’s most cost effective. You can tell they’re very good at it by their highly competitive retail prices. They run rings around Walmart.
If you’ve really accumulated a pile of 15 dead LED lights at this point in time, you’d better have somebody come out and see what’s wrong with your wiring. LEDs tend to have very long lives under normal conditions. That’s why they’re used to light most flat screen televisions and computer monitors.
Whatever extent to which coal has become “cleaner” is because of regulation.
Meanwhile, yet another document surfaces showing not only how the administration ignored the ISIS threat, but helps to answer the question from Word’s other thread about who created ISIS.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/pgs-287-293-291-jw-v-dod-and-state-14-812-2/
When I see a claim such as President Obama’s heart wasn’t in signing a new SOFA with Iraq, it’s pretty clear that objectivity is lacking. The U.S. upset a delicate balance in the Middle East by invading Iraq and toppling Sadaam Hussein, and we opened the Pandora’s Box that spawned ISIS. It’s a pretty simple story. Our withdrawal from Iraq was a natural consequence of an incompetent and hostile Al-Maliki who was already scheming with Iran in our presence. I don’t see how anybody can in good conscience argue that we should have kept our troops sitting vulnerable in that cess pool, being targeted by traitorous Iraqi police recruits every week. I’d rather have a less ambiguous ISIS to go back and deal with now than leaving our troops in the kind of situation they were in.
@Lean6:
All true indeed, but you left out one very important detail; in between upsetting the delicate balance and spawning ISIS, the surge cleared out most of the insurgents, secured Iraq and gave them the chance to create a viable government and security. Enter the idiot Obama that could not destroy this success fast enough who, desperately needing positive headlines, pulled all our forces out of Iraq, ignoring every advice against such a stupid move. THEN ISIS was spawned and allowed to spread without impediment.
@Bill:
I think it’s all too convenient and overly simplistic to say that the surge cleared out the insurgents or secured Iraq. Armies fall back and regroup, rearm, and replenish. There’s always been the expectation and assurance that as soon as we left Iraq, the insurgents would come back if there wasn’t an Iraqi army to take our place. If anything, they knew that we couldn’t and didn’t want to stay in Iraq forever, so they waited us out. Meanwhile, ISIS was growing in Syria. It wasn’t a stupid move pulling out of Iraq; it was necessary in the evolution of the war that continues there. I don’t think there’s any serious person in government and the military who thought for one second that we wouldn’t have to go back there. Again, I think going back there with less ambiguity in the mission, less gaming from the Iraqi government, clear targets to shoot at, and perhaps even an Arab coalition is more desirable than where we were when we left.
@Lean6: correct, just go over and anniliate ISIS and we’ll be good for a few years.
@Redteam:
After 23 years, i’m personally retired. But, yes I do believe that we will be standing watch in Iraq for many years to come. Hopefully, Iraq will be a better host government when we go back…when we’re invited back.
@Lean6:
Well, you did wander onto a conservative blog…. 😉 Not offering objectivity but perspective.
It isn’t just my claim. Did you take the time to read some of the links to others who talk about how little attention and interest President Obama seemed to give Iraq? His team’s attempt at renegotiating the SoFA happened very late. Prior to this beginning around summer of 2011, he seemed mostly disengaged.
June 23, 2014- Peter Beinhart in The Atlantic:
Maliki was an imperfect player- but who else was there at the time? During the Bush presidency, that administration flexed its will and influence over Maliki. Current one, not so much.
Read the whole thing.
Are you sure you aren’t confusing Iraq with Afghanistan (green on blue attacks)?
By the summer of 2008, post-Surge, violence in Iraq had dropped to the lowest levels since year one of OIF. Sectarian killings were down by 95%; and American deaths which routinely were at 100/month at one time dipped to single digit numbers toward the end of Bush’s tenure.
Military commanders and soldiers on the ground- not just pundits and keyboard bloggers Monday Morning quarterbacking with an opinion like me- were saying back in 2011 that we did not want a premature exit only to have to go back again. That this would prove costlier. There is no quick-fix, do-things-on-the-cheap. It seems to be President Obama’s foreign policy approach to dealing with the Middle East crisis and now look at it.
ISIS would not even be resurgent in Iraq if not for
A. Given breeding ground in Syria.
B. Complete uprooting from Iraq
A comment posted on an FB page honoring Bush 43:
Bob Woodward– pretty down-the-middle- on Fox News Sunday, today:
@Wordsmith:
I did read quite a bit of it. I thought the criticism was unfair and baseless. It’s just time to be a little frank and realistic here. If anything, I suspect President Obama was dealing with the same dynamics with Al-Maliki that he was dealing with here with Boehner and every other GOP politician who wanted to make a name for themselves…or even those the likes of Netanyahu and Putin who wanted to appear strong against President Obama. Basically, I think Al-Maliki made it personal. It’s a shame that we sent the message abroad that it was ok to deal with our President that way.
I’m pretty sure that I recall the same thing happening in Iraq.
The reality of it though is that these same people were opposed to a time table…meaning we were going to stay there indefinitely, dealing with Al-Maliki and an Iraq that was likely to never become independently capable of defending itself. So, back to the SoFA, Al-Maliki left us no choice. I remember that guy being quoted saying some derogatory stuff about America. He was really full of himself. Ultimately, the fact of the matter is that bringing the troops home was President Obama’s goal, and Americans elected him to do that. I don’t think you’ll find more than a conservative-liberal ratio of people who would say that we should have stayed under those conditions.
Syria is another ball game. I don’t think there were any other moves in Syria, given the dynamics there with regard to Israel and Russia waiting to jump in to complicate things, and with the sheer uncertainty of who was who and who was doing what to whom. I don’t think that Iraq is all that special. If it wasn’t Iraq, it would have been Yemen or somewhere else.