I've noticed you seem to heap blame disproportionately on Obama when as GladiatoRowdy noted it was Bush who signed the SOFA. Consider also that the main sticking point towards a continued status of forces agreement was that US Forces be subject to Iraqi courts. As someone who served there I am guessing you would not have liked to have been under the jurisdiction of Iraqi courts.
The intention was always that Bush's successor would renegotiate a new SOFA when the time came to allow for the changing situation on the ground. The Pentagon wanted some residual force to remain until approximately 2017, something in the range of 10K troops. Yes, maliki was being difficult, but he had to play domestic politics to an extent. This should have been expected. Go and read up on the actual "negotiations" that took place. There were hardly any. The negotiators even came out and said after the withdrawal that they were provided no direction from the White House, which made it impossible for them to negotiate. That is ENTIRELY on Obama and his administration. Of course we were not going to subject ourselves to Iraqi law. But that was always the caase and always will be the case in situations like these. It was not an insurmountable point in previous negotiations and it wouldn't have been in these negotiations either - had there been any serious negotiations, that is. All there was was back and forth in the media, which equals jack **** for hammering out a SOFA. Even Maliki and his government expressed shock afterwards that no SOFA was put in place. They were *not* expecting it to play out that way, and it is not a coincidence that ever since then this administration has had a very difficult time working with the Iraqi government. The Iraqis know that Obama left them hanging in order to win an election. You're damned right this could have been avoided. At several points of opportunity this could have been avoided. Obama has been in office for nearly 6 years now - he absolutely WILL be held responsible for this. If you don't believe me, ask yourself who history blamed for the Vietnam fiasco - Nixon and Johnson primarily. Who got us into it, eh?
Please read this account for a summary of what I just posted: Despite Difficult Talks, U.S. and Iraq Had Expected Some American Troops to Stay http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/middleeast/united-states-and-iraq-had-not-expected-troops-would-have-to-leave.html?_r=0 Relevant quotes: And for the negotiators who labored all year to avoid that outcome, it represented the triumph of politics over the reality of Iraq’s fragile security’s requiring some troops to stay, a fact everyone had assumed would prevail. But officials also held out hope that after the withdrawal, the two countries could restart negotiations more productively, as two sovereign nations... At the end of the Bush administration, when the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, was negotiated, setting 2011 as the end of the United States’ military role, officials had said the deadline was set for political reasons, to put a symbolic end to the occupation and establish Iraq’s sovereignty. But there was an understanding, a senior official here said, that a sizable American force would stay in Iraq beyond that date.... Through the summer, American officials continued to assume that the agreement would be amended, and Mr. Obama was willing to support a continued military presence. In June, diplomats and Iraqi officials said that Mr. Obama had told Mr. Maliki that he was prepared to leave up to 10,000 soldiers to continue training and equipping the Iraqi security forces. Mr. Maliki agreed, but said he needed time to line up political allies. This one is also good reading, too: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/01/13/the-mccain-graham-claim-iraqs-main-political-blocs-were-supportive-of-keeping-u-s-troops-in-iraq/
Whose a$$ did you pull this one out of? Please provide a link that substantiates this, it looks like something you got from bullsh!t mountain. If it were up to the Pentagon, we likely would have stayed in Vietnam until the 1980s. Still, I haven't seen anything, EVER, that indicates what you are claiming might be true. Please, provide articles, I can't take your word for it, as the result of your severe ODS. There was one, it was signed by then-president Bush, then implemented by Obama. ...by people with ODS. Johnson, then escalated by Nixon. All we had in Vietnam before Johnson took office was about 16,000 troops, compared to the half million at the height of the war. http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Vietnam.aspx
This is Obama's would be Syrian war spilling over to Iraq. ISIS is using tons of weapons either given by or stolen from the US.
Two links provided right above your post. All that tells me is that you never actually read any of the links I post. Again, two links answering EXACTLY these questions provided above. Two links provided directly above this post. Please click on them and turn your brain on. We have SOFAs with many nations. They are fairly standard fare when our troops are stationed in a foreign country. And as a rule we do not subject our troops to foreign legal systems, they are under US UCMJ. Dream on. When children ask who lost the Middle East the answer will be a resounding "President Obama" When he came into office Egypt was an ally, Iraq was an ally, Qaddafi was compliant, Syria was a coherent nation... When he leaves Egypt will be in the Russian sphere, Syria will bea hodgepodge of terrorist enclaves, Iraq will be Iran's ally, the Saudis will be seeking other patrons (they already are), Israel is not longer special, and Al Qaeda in Iraq (currently known as ISIS/ISIL) will have formed the nucleus of the new caliphate. None of these things happened on Bush's watch. The only people who will deny this will be people such as yourself. Everyone else will know whose fault it was. My God you're so dishonest. Even when trying to report a fact you bungle it.Trying to deflect blame from Johnson... You know there's a reason he did not seek, and would not accept... He is the one who elevated those troop levels and bungled the war. Nixon got us out of it. http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm The point was, of course, that Eisenhower and Kennedy were not remembered as the ones who first put US boots on the ground, Johnson is primarily remembered because he is the one who bungled the war.
"Bush's successor" is skewed to whomever won the next election. Both campaigned drawing out of Iraq since that was what Bush started. Obama won so it was considered his mandate to do whatever he wanted. So if you want to point fingers, blame the electorate for not having patience with two wars without end started by a president way out of his league.
His mandate is to governmresponsibly, not do whatever he feels like doing at the moment. I do blame the electorate. Not just them, but they certainly deserve some blame. Wars are not easy things, especially counterinsurgencies. On average they usually take about a decade, sometimes a little longer. It's easy to sit back here and say a war isn't necessary. And then you get to see what happens when you decide not to engage in one - this. The Middle East falling to islamofascists. If you think this will remain contained within the confines of that geographic area, then you were asleep on 9/11. The jihad is a global affair, and for these people the struggle never ends - at least not until every single living human being is an adherent to their particular faith. Decisions have consequences. We are seeing the consequences of Obama's poor decision in 2011 play out now. And we are passive bystanders at this point. All we can do is cross out fingers and hope the Iranians can save the day.
There was a religious civil war in Iraq before we got there, there will be one after we leave. If the scale of the US commitment to Iraq doesn't prove to you that it is beyond the scope of an outside force I'm not sure what it would take. There is no end to Shia, Sunni hostilities, none. It wasn't an outlandish thought in 1990's that if you brought down the brutal dictator the people would join together. It just turned out to be wrong. I was wrong.
Of course thee will be. These people have been fighting for nearly 1400 years now, it isn't going to stop anytime soon. No one has EVER proposed an open-ended commitment. It is disingenuous to argue from that point. What we and the Iraqis needed was a few more years to allow the Iraqi Army and other government entities to continue their development. You don't build a national Army overnight. It took ours a decade to get it's **** together. It takes time to build effective armies. The Iraqis were not remotely ready in 2011/12, just as the Afghans will not be ready in 2014/15. Afghan is going to fall to the Taliban after we leave, BTW. It's as predictable as night following day. But for the Iraqis, we knew at that time they needed about another 6-7 years of hand-holding and guardianship before they would be ready to deal with both internal and external threats. The *responsible* thing would have been to negotiate another SOFA (as was expected by pretty much everyone involved) and keep a residual force there to oversee the IA's development and to blunt any further moves by the at-the-time decimated AQI. If you break it, you fix it, and all of that... Instead, we left them holding the bag. With no American presence in the area the Syrian civil war took off and there was nothing to stop AQI's resurgence (as ISIL), as they could freely move between the porous Syria-Iraq border. This could most certainly have been avoided. I am going to keep saying that, because it is true.
The choosing of an end point is subjective when the result is going to be the same. I think we gave a hell of an effort, one that our grandchildren will still be paying for. Enough is enough, we did all we could do, time to go, good luck.
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It wouldn't have been had we stayed and saw it through. It would be more accurate to say that the net result of the Iraq invasion, occupation, and premature withdrawal is a strengthened Iran and a burgeoning Al Qaeda state. That last part is an important part of the equation that led us to this point.
Oh, and let's see a show of hands of everyone who wanted to bomb Assad last year in support of these guys. We had a big, big argument over whether we should intervene militarily against Assad, and I and others here were told we would regret not supporting military intervention against ISIS's enemies. When some politician stated that to do so would make us "Al Qaeda's air force", they were ridiculed. What say you now? C'mon, don't be shy. Let the whole world see your foreign policy brilliance on full display...
