Being right about an Iraq pullout
Romney was right about the Iraq pullout.
George W. Bush was right about the Iraq pullout.
I was right about Obama’s intention to pull out of Iraq, which he had expressed time and again even before he became president (see also this about the consequences of withdrawal).
But before we all applaud ourselves for our prescient brilliance, let me just say it took nothing of the sort to have made the prediction. It merely took not being a liberal or a leftist to have the ability to see the dangers and state them.
The probable repercussions of a total withdrawal were obvious. Anyone who didn’t see them was in purposeful and aware denial, or lives in a fantasy world. The first group is the knaves, the second the fools.
I always claim the lefties live in fantasy land.
Do you have a category for those who thought this was the point?
Richard Aubrey
At the point of withdrawal in 2011, simply staying would have been uncontroversial.
The Iraq mission was on a clear trend toward the stabilized state of our Europe and Asia partnerships. It was off the front page. The dollar cost was dropping sharply. Our troops were characterizing the mission as routine and boring. While Iraqis didn’t claim to like us there, they had accepted us as part of the post-Saddam social political fabric. (People talk about the inevitability of thousands of years of Middle East social culture precluding nation-building as though Europe and Asia sprang fresh from the Earth in 1944-45 without centuries – millennia – of wars.) Many of them were privately saying our role continued to be necessary at that stage of their social political development.
Obama had a blueprint to negotiate the SOFA from Bush. The Maliki position for Obama was no different than the Maliki position for Bush. That’s just negotiation with a sovereign, like our other SOFA re-negotiations, yet Obama chose to take a passive-aggressive approach, among other drawbacks capping the troop number at 3-5 thousand, which wasn’t sufficient for force protection let alone serve a practical function. The Iraqis had no reason to accept an ineffective standing force.
Military commanders were recommending a very manageable 16-20 thousand troops as a standing force in Iraq. Compare that to the 30,000 troops we maintain today in Korea, where our troop presence has dropped incrementally over the years.
By Obama’s own description, a pluralistic liberalizing Iraq could play a constructive regional role. We had turned a corner there. The 1st step that was easier than expected and the 2nd step was harder than expected, but they were done.
When we finally had a grip on the situation that we could project progressively long-term, we left for no compelling reason and threw away the peace in order to “end the war”.
Eric.
Point is, for dems, “to lose the war”. It’s their job, if the military manages to win on the battlefield.
I agree with your point, but I don’t think it was such a good idea to go in in the first place.
Even now, no-one is willing to connect the dots.
ISIS is largely a creation of Barry Soetoro — with a helping hand from Erdogan, Qatar, Britain, Jordan, et. al.
Without the anti-Assad cohort, al-Baghdadi had nothing to work with. He was but one of a motley crew of fanatics.
West has posted much of the dirt to the Web.
Some (government) entity is blocking any attempt to post West’s Web pages to this blog.
My allegations are based upon open sources from the Web: al-Reuters, al-WSJ, al-NYT, al-WP, al-AP and all the other usual suspects.
West has additional leakers feeding him hot stuff.
EVEN NOW, no-one wants to tell the truth: ISIS is BLOW-BACK.
Barry HAD the perfect scheme. He was going to go with, and stay with, proxy armies. We are doing so at this very time in Somalia. Even Kenya is a party to our campaign there. Even the Russian and Red Chinese navies are participating in the piracy suppression campaign.
We used proxy (jihadi) armies in Libya. That campaign was run by Congress — on the down low. What was open in the international press remained a secret with Congress. (Washington’s reality is that of the press release. Reporters in the field are dismissed out of hand.)
Barry and Hillary ran the ISIS/ Jordanian cohort on the down low — because they feared AIPAC. So, this time around, Congress was kept in the dark.
Everything is worse than my worst imaginings.
Even those hostile to Soetoro have yet to utter a word about his ISIS connection. They’re buying everything at face value.
As Hitler, Stalin and all the rest have showed, you can never take a despot’s version of reality.
Since all ‘isms’ of the left, to one degree or another, reject critical aspects of reality, they can all be fairly said to be both in denial and living in a fantasy world.
Even those on the left who are in it strictly for the power are in denial as well, though the motivation is different from ideological idealism, they too are in denial, in that they believe that the acquisition of power can bring their souls surcease from the emptiness within…
Iraq and Afghanistan has become a great place for the Left to dump people they want to see dead.
This is what all the bastos talking about peace and anti war and containing Saddam Hussein logickally led to, in around 2004. This is what they wanted.
And this is what they got.
While many of them were too blind to see what was beyond obvious, many of our left-liberal friends did not care. So, the Middle East is on fire. 10s of thousands are being butchered. Many of the same knaves still don’t care a whit. They’d rather that Obama concentrate on the Illegal Entry Con, the Race Snake Oil and making Buffy at Mickey D’s paid a $15.00 starting hourly rate. The Micro-Brained Jerry Brown here in California has issued and open invite to illegals accompanied with a guarantee that they’ll receive valid California Drivers Licenses. Left unsaid, Gov. Idiocy may as well have issued a worldwide invitation to ISIS, al Qaeda and their Dark Age ilk to come on in masquerading as Latinos.
The Inmates are in control of much of our sacred country. Beginning, obviously, with the White House. And, need I add, Hillary is not, nor ever will be, a Maggie Thatcher wannabe.
Eric…AMEN!!!!
Range, you sure don’t make me homesick for my nearly lifelong home state. Absolutely Bat***t Crazy. That said, please send the San Gabriels and Sierras to Central Florida. Thank you. ((-:
John Boy Kerry wanted to abandon Iraq in his 2004 bid for the presidency. Now, lucky-blessed us, he’s at Foggy Bottom. His Infantile Majesty Obama broadcast to all the Islamist Murderers on the planet that he was going to do exactly that and fully display his Vast Testicular Concavity. They’re ALL snickering in unison, Yer Majesty.
Let’s see if I’ve got the hang of the goings on:
Oust Mubarak for Arab Spring — get Morsi and the Brotherhood — Oust Morsi!
Oust Gaddafi, for Arab Spring — get Benghazi murderers, Boko Haram, and Harakat Shabaab al-Mujahidin – get the damn murderers! Stop Boko Haram, and Harakat Shabaab al-Mujahidin!
Bomb Damascus, oust Assad for the rebels – who turn out to be ISIS. Now, bomb ISIS!
“Hawks that believed it to be imperative to attack the Syrian government last year now believe it to be imperative to attack some of the government’s enemies this year.” — Daniel Larison
Of course, this goes for the above mentioned and Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Seems the revolutionaries for the advancement of Democracy will not stand down until Israel is safe from Islam and the world made safe for the big D.
We don’t know what we’re doing — never have. Our foreign adventures are a fantasia of dreams, wishes, hopes, and desires. Ophilia’s pull out makes no difference in the long run for in the long run an Islamic majority country is incapable of fulfilling our desires and expectations. One need only look to the Raj that had become India and Pakistan. Note Pakistan, democracy, and the long run. Absent a strong man who will keep order and protect minorities for just that purpose, you get murderous Imams and Caliphate states. It still hasn’t dawned on the West there is no middle in the Middle East — nor in Islam.
The idea that a country full of traitors and weaklings will have a unified foreign policy is rather a dream unto a dream. America is no more functional than Iraq right now. It just looks better on the wallet.
This issue as well as the others shows that the messiah was wrong about all the core issues of the 2012 campaign.
But will that effed the low IQ voters who decide elections?
Yes. Deducing the disaster that would follow an Iraq pullout was like deducing 2+2=4. Deducing the disaster that would be the Obama foreign policy was even less difficult.
But for liberals somehow 2+2 always equals free stuff for everyone and terrorists magically transformed to nice guys.
blert,
I haven’t read the Allen West ‘Op Zero Footprint’ page you recommended. However, as you said, just based on what’s open source, the signs point compellingly to a ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen strategy.
Obama has supported regime change in the Arab Spring without US boots on the ground, which necessarily means proxies, which necessarily includes Islamist factions.
Now, the Afghan mujahideen were diverse. They included the factions that made up the Northern Alliance as well as the Taliban, and other factions in between. We preferred more moderate factions and didn’t specifically support the Taliban. We were separate from Arab ‘volunteers’ like bin Laden who were not mujahideen. But our general support for the Afghan mujahideen most likely or even effectively meant we also supported the radical factions we did not favor.
Where the West contention steps off open sources and gets murky – and again, I haven’t read the Allen West site you’ve recommended – is the contention that Obama deliberately chose to ‘nation-build’ the worst Islamist factions like ISIS. As you’ve also said, that’s a big step beyond the ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ model.
At the WaPo March Thiessen piece, note that in the comments, the rebuttals emphasize the ‘Bush lied’ theme.
Again, it’s important to set the record straight that OIF was, in fact, right on the law and justified on the policy.
” Anyone who didn’t see them was in purposeful and aware denial, or lives in a fantasy world. The first group is the knaves, the second the fools.”
1. This describes every Democrat everywhere, all the time.
2. But it’s too mild and shrinks away from the total truth. The horrible total truth is that the majority are not “in denial”. They know damn well what they are doing. They are evil and rotten and seek to destroy an/or “fundamentally transform” America.
They are not “mistaken” or somehow psychologically flawed. They are, rather, wicked psychos. They have chosen evil. Let us at least give them the respect of leaving them to their choices!
Everyone seems to imagine evil will look like in the movies. It does not! It looks closer to the person to the left or right of you. Hanna Arendt. She’s the one who sussed it perfectly. It’s banal. It’s everyday. It really is them! It has always been this way and always will be. Our age is so narcissistic and pretentious and grandiose to think it somehow isn’t thqt.
Mike:
You’re not describing the majority of Democrats I know, and I know plenty of them.
You’re describing activist leftists, who are a small percentage.
We disagree on that one.
Of the Democrats – there are some in willful ignorance. That is still wrong by any measure of conventional morality. I.e. It is immoral behavior. It is wrong. They are wrong.
There are some whose ignorance is for one reason or another “invincible” in the old terminology. They are less at fault than the first group, but they are still responsible to some degree.
The rest are unspeakably wicked and that’s it full stop.
These people, let’s remember, kill babies for sport, money, and comfort; they for practical purposes imprison whole social subgroups into poverty, ghettos, drugs and despair. They use brute force to spy on people and take their money from them via regulations and taxes and government bureaucracies. They lie cheat and steal every possible election they can. At their very best! they say that a man can marry a man and that a woman might be a man or vice versa.
I do not call them evil. Reality, Justice, and Decency themselves call them evil.
And finally, I use the word “evil” in the classic sense – an absence of good; a defect in the good; a privation of good. In that definition it is a given that there is plenty of good there, but it is turned to the dark side for whatever reason. It is good to have muscular strength. You may build a house with that strength or play the knock-out game. They chose the latter. That’s what evil is.
You’re not describing the majority of Democrats I know, and I know plenty of them.
The majority of Democrats like accessories to the crime or guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Oh they didn’t intend it.
But whether it is voluntary or not, the emphasis is on the manslaughter, not the intent so much. And the punishment for the sin doesn’t vary that much. Prison by this amount of years vs prison by the other.
There have been more than a few obviously evil acts perpetrated (either by action or deliberate inaction) by the truly pathetic bunch in executive and senatorial power since the Pretender in Chief’s January 20, 2009 swearing-in. Choose your own topper from the carnage, but the one that grinds on me most is what a regular commenter here calls “The Abandonment of our Massive Victory in Iraq”. The reaping of what any blind, retarded doofus could have forseen with the ISIS barbarians is simply unspeakably loathsome. Follow that up with Obama & Kerry’s literal sand bagging of Israel and particularly its Prime Minister. Evil, plain and simple.
Meanwhile with chaos as the backdrop, lets not bring up Iran and our most excellent strategy to prevent them from getting the bomb.
Stark and Range… Absolutely!! Re-Iran’s nuke progress, aided and abetted by our leadership cowards, the pathetic twits in the White House and Foggy Bottom won’t do s*** themselves and will prevent Bibi from taking drastic action.
Neo: “You’re not describing the majority of Democrats I know, and I know plenty of them. You’re describing activist leftists, who are a small percentage.”
A tribe only needs so many chieftains.
The problem is the majority of Democrats loyally and uncritically uphold the talking points of the party line and, at this stage of the (activist) game (the only social political game there is), Left activists are writing the Democrats party line.
Eric: I, like Neo, have many friends here in So. California who are terrific and often hugely talented people but always seem lobotomized by liberalism. It is sometimes stunning how deeply and unquestioning the Koolaid has been consumed to the marrow. Now and then I show my longtime neoconservative stripes, but usually it isn’t worth it as they are literally unreachable with critical thinking in the politics-culture areas. I live and work in the midst of quite stand up Koolaid consumers. (Benedict Canyon, B.Hills & a large west side studio) Sometimes, happily, I do see ‘tells’ among young ones that do give me hope though.