Iraq probe implicates Maliki over Mosul’s fall to ISIL

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An Iraqi parliamentary committee says that former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and other officials were to blame for allowing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to overrun Mosul last year, and has called for them to face trial.

The committee, which presented the conclusion of its investigation to parliament speaker Salim al-Juburi on Sunday, implicated 36 officials in the loss of the country’s second city, sources in Juburi’s office told Al Jazeera.

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The battle for Mosul, the last remaining ISIS stronghold in Iraq, is now underway. One million civilians are living in the city.

@Greg: I doubt that 1M people are living in Mosul. Many moved out months ago. Mosul was a Kurdish city before Saddam forcibly moved Sunnis into the city.

Trump: Now We’re Bogged Down In Mosul Because Obama Gave Away The Element Of Surprise

Either the man is an idiot, or he thinks his supporters are idiots.

Mosul is the last remaining ISIS stronghold in Iraq. The liberation of Mosul has been a primary Coalition goal for two years. Coalition forces have been moving in and encircling the city for weeks. What “element of surprise” is Trump babbling about?

@Greg:

Mosul and other areas of Iraq occupied by isis never should have happened had lunch box joe and the boner in chief properly negotiated a SOFA. That is not in dispute despite the leftists best efforts to portray it otherwise.

@July 4th American, #4:

Yeah, right. Except for the small matter that no one in the Obama administration had anything to do with negotiating the SOFA. That little gem was negotiated, signed, sealed, and delivered—all without any votes ever being taken in Congress—by the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, back in reality: Colin Powell Says He’ll Vote for Hillary Clinton. Because What other sane choice is there? It isn’t like Powell isn’t eminently qualified to know what’s going on and to make an intelligent choice. It isn’t Hillary Clinton vs. a collection of traditional conservative values and principles embodied within an even-tempered, well-qualified republican candidate. It’s Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump. We’re going to get one or the other, all faults and flaws included.

@Greg:

Yeah, right. Except for the small matter that no one in the Obama administration had anything to do with negotiating the SOFA. That little gem was negotiated, signed, sealed, and delivered—all without any votes every being taken in Congress—by the Bush administration

Complete bullshit, you should be ashamed of yourself….

@July 4th American, #6:

Maybe you need to go back and review recent history. The SOFA was signed by representatives of Iraq and the United States on November 17, 2008, ratified by the Iraqi Parliament on November 27, 2008, and finally approved by the Presidency Council of Iraq on December 4, 2008. The binding document established the date for the final withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq.

The right blames Obama for not somehow undoing the provisions that the Bush administration agreed to and locked into place. Had Obama agreed to put U.S. military personnel under the jurisdiction of Iraqi civil courts in order gain their permission to remain in Iraq longer, the right would have blamed him for that.

Iraq set an unacceptable condition for revising the timetable, so the original timetable that the Bush administration established stood. It’s as simple as that.

@Greg:

. That little gem was negotiated, signed, sealed, and delivered—all without any votes every being taken in Congress—by the Bush administratio

Status of forces agreement do not require Congressional approval.

One of the key points of debate in the U.S. over the recent events in Iraq is over what the U.S. could have done to avert them. If the U.S. still had troops there, would Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have become the sectarian strongman he has, would ISIS have established the stronghold it has, etc.? This is a complicated question, and one should never be too confident in counterfactuals. But there’s a compelling case articulated by a range of people that a U.S. presence there could have made today’s situation less likely, and certainly allowed us to have more options to respond today. But here’s an easy way for Democrats to avoid the debate entirely: Claim that President Obama had no choice about whether to keep troops in Iraq or not, and blame Bush. The inconvenient aspect of this argument is that it’s not true. Chris Hayes laid out four points in the opening monologue of his show on Friday night, three of which consituted the above argument:

The three problematic claims: [1] Any residual U.S. force we might have left in Iraq would have been minimal and in a non-combat role, somewhere on the order of 2–3,000 [troops]. . . . [2] We could not have stayed unless the Iraqi government let us stay — Iraq is a sovereign nation and the al-Maliki government wanted American troops to leave. . . . [3] The status-of-forces agreement, the basic framework upon which American withdrawal was based, came from the administration of George W. Bush. These claims don’t jibe with what we know about how the negotiations with Iraq went. It’s the White House itself that decided just 2–3,000 troops made sense, when the Defense Department and others were proposing more. Maliki was willing to accept a deal with U.S. forces if it was worth it to him — the problem was that the Obama administration wanted a small force so that it could say it had ended the war. Having a very small American force wasn’t worth the domestic political price Maliki would have to pay for supporting their presence. In other words, it’s not correct that “the al-Maliki government wanted American troops to leave.” That contradicts the reporting that’s been done on the issue by well-known neocon propaganda factories The New Yorker and the New York Times. Prime Minister Maliki did say in public, at times, that he personally couldn’t offer the guarantees necessary to keep U.S. troops in the country, but it’s well-established that behind closed doors, he was interested in a substantial U.S. presence. The Obama administration, in fact, doesn’t even really deny it: For Dexter Filkins’s New Yorker story, deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes didn’t dispute this issue, he just argued that a U.S. troop presence wouldn’t have been a panacea.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/380508/no-us-troops-didnt-have-leave-iraq-patrick-brennan

@July 4th American, #9:

In other words, it’s not correct that “the al-Maliki government wanted American troops to leave.”

It doesn’t matter what they might have secretly wanted. All that matters is the fact that the al-Maliki government set a totally unacceptable condition for U.S. troops to remain beyond the date the Bush administration SOFA set for their final departure, and then refused to abandon that totally unacceptable condition.

Patrick Brennan can talk circles around that one central point until the cows come home, but the fact still remains. Anyone who ignores it is creating an an alternate imaginary history.

@Greg:

Your president sent lunch bucket joe to negotiate the SOFA and he failed. Your president failed because he never wanted to continue what had been built upon. He would have had to share in the success and his inability to do that has the state of affairs in iraq and elsewhere in the ME.

Your president did not want a ME were freedom was on the march, his preference was an radical Islamic state which is exactly what it is today, some success huh?

Your president and that nasty woman, mrs clinton, turned the ME into a complete foreign policy disaster.

But, do not look to the state run media to tell the American People the truth, it is not what they want us to know……

So, it would have been acceptable to you to leave American personnel in Iraq to prop up al-Maliki’s increasingly sectarian government at the expense of U.S. taxpayers, agreeing that they would be turned over to local Iraqi courts for prosecution and trial in the event of any unfortunate incidents?

I’m sure republicans would have found that entirely agreeable and supported Obama if he had accepted that condition. Right?

More likely they would have used that unacceptable concession as a weapon against him in the 2012 election. I’d say the chances of that would have been somewhere around 100 percent.

Your president and that nasty woman, mrs clinton, turned the ME into a complete foreign policy disaster.

Donald Trump has pointed out on numerous occasions that the Bush administration’s scheme to invade and occupy Iraq was a foreign policy blunder of epic proportions—possibly proving the axiom that even a blind squirrel finds an occasional acorn. What followed had been predicted by our intelligence agencies before that invasion was even undertaken. The disaster had already taken place. Obama inherited clean-up duty. Even that was complicated by preexisting conditions established by the Bush SOFA.

@Greg: Actually dumbo, The troops were in Iraq to train and support the fledgling police force and army. It takes at least 20 years to develop effective senior detectives, army officers army NCO. That was not allowed to happen. Also Maliki was allowed to destroy the army and police effectiveness by stripping out the Sunnis and replacing them with incompetent Shia. Then he allowed ISIS to destroy primary Sunni cities.

Obama had the power to force Iraq to accept a SOFA that would have met our requirements as a country. Obama wanted to meet a campaign promise no matter the consequences. Obama owns the ISIS situation, the Iranian debacle and the failures in Iraq. That is real history, not what you imagine in your warped mind.

@Randy, #13:

Obama had the power to force Iraq to accept a SOFA that would have met our requirements as a country.

Right. He could have simply ignored the terms of the Bush administration’s negotiated SOFA and forced the Iraqi government to our will. Then we would have been back to square one, with a renewed insurgency and ourselves in the roll of a hostile occupying military force. I suppose that might have had the effect of unifying Iraqi sectarian factions.

Obama owns the ISIS situation, the Iranian debacle and the failures in Iraq.

The political right owns stupidity, persistent delusional thinking, and an inability to learn a damn thing from past errors. They won’t even acknowledge the existence of errors. They just alter the story and shift the blame.

@Greg: Well Greg, you are every bit as smart as Obama. With your intelligence, we and Iraq would be in the same place we are now. You have no knowledge of the facts nor any idea as to what was happening in Iraq, but you both make bone headed decisions. Neither of you are concerned with unintended consequences.. So now instead of working to assist Iraq in reconstruction, we have Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey not to mention 17 other countries with terrorists. Great job Greg and Obama! Americans are now prey to every despot in the world since Obama paid ransom for 4 Americans. Great work! Now whose side is Obama on?