Iraq: We Are All to Blame…pt 2…Barack Obama
Now that we’ve given proper attention to how this whole sordid mess got started we can move on because there is no one whose hands are clean when it comes to Iraq. This might be why President Obama has wisely avoided finger pointing and is instead consumed with addressing the issues as they stand today. I think it’s obvious that President Obama was given a bad hand in Iraq. When he took office American troops were stationed there, but the situation was untenable. President Obama ran on a platform that called for ending both the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Many experts commented that telling your enemy the specific timeline of your withdrawal is not a great war strategy. However, the situation in Iraq was simply one that was not going to be sustainable for America. Americans wanted our troops out of Iraq as soon as possible and the situation on the ground in Iraq was bound to deteriorate once America left.
To this end President Obama engaged in some halfhearted talks with Iraqi President Nouri Al- Maliki. Al Maliki was under pressure from Iran not to harbor any American troops and President Obama was under pressure from the American public to end American engagement in Iraq. Both men unwisely bent to the pressure.
As President Obama sought to find diplomatic common ground with Iran and pivot his attention to a surging China, he put Iraq on the back burner. As far as I can see he sat idly by, while Al- Maliki undermined democracy in Iraq by crushing his political opposition and denying the minority Sunnis and Kurds a proper role in government. He did little to address the rising influence of Iran on Iraqi politics and single mindedly focused on American national security priorities. In other words, President Obama focused on situations he could guarantee some results from such as hunting down terrorists with drone strikes, and turned his attention from the more thorny issues of how to respond to the Arab Spring, Iraq, and Syria.
With America out of the picture It was only a matter of time before the situation would deteriorate. President Obama should have pushed harder to secure a military agreement in Iraq. Would it have put American troops in harms way? Yes. Was it unpopular politically? Yes, but sometimes a president needs to make hard and tough decisions which are not backed by public demand or even square with the president’s assumptions about the situation. American military boots were needed on the ground to make it clear that America was present and still focused on Iraq after the war. When we left it sent a message to Iran and other actors in the Middle East that the area was no longer a priority for America. This created a vacuum of power which Iran and President Nouri Al-Maliki exploited to the advantage of Shiite Muslims, which inflamed religious differences across the region.
President Obama further aggravated this situation by hesitating to act in Syria while ISIS and other revolutionary groups were gaining power. He has since tried to rectify this by requesting military supplies to more moderate revolutionary groups which have been fighting against ISIS and the Syrian government (I don’t know how this will fare because those groups are now essentially fighting a two front war). He and other Western Powers mistakenly assumed that the revolutionary groups engaged in Syria would recognize national borders and refrain from spreading their war across the Middle East. President Obama assumed that he could ensure American National Security interests by focusing narrowly on terrorist threats without engaging directly engaging the radical forces that are destabilizing countries throughout the Middle East. This is proving to be more of a stop gap measure than an actual solution to the problem. It seems that by removing American troops from Iraq, President Obama was only able to reduce American involvement in the short term while beginning a countdown to Iraq’s disintegration. As with any speculative activity we can’t be certain that Iraq would actually be better off if American troops had stayed. We can say it couldn’t be worse though. Perhaps it would only have postponed what seems to be the inevitable disintegration of Iraq in the aftermath of the American invasion.
Couple comments.
First-
The treaty to fully remove American troops from Iraq was a done deal before Obama took office. The Dec 2011 deadline was negotiated and signed in 2008 under Pres. Bush. see link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93Iraq_Status_of_Forces_Agreement
Leaving tropps was not an option for anyone, after the horrific Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq peaking in 2006 or thereabouts. This was considered a predictable result of our pointless invasion etc, which is a subject that I think has been beat to death at this point. Any Iraqi leader who did not ask American troops to leave would be removed in the next election.
Second comment- Our method of temporarily stabilizing the civil war in Iraq.
This was basically a three-fold strategy. First of course was fighting. Then, we actively engaged with the Sunni tribes in the North and basically gave them cash payments in exchange for their cooperation. Lastly, we got the cooperation of the Shiites in the South by telling them we would leave the country, after which, per the Iraqi national demographics, the Shiites would control the government. The rapid advance of ISIS can be understood once we see the hollow nature of the “support” we established for our government there — we never really had any allies in Iraq at all, not after everything we wrecked there.
Third comment, Syria –
It’s not that Obama hesitated to act. He went further than that. I recall the Obama administration was actually quite actively pushing to go to war there, in late summer and fall of last year (2013), having funded some the armed opposition groups for some time, and passively consented while our allies (Saudi Arabia, Turkey) funded other groups. I argued against this war and against our funding of the Syrian revolutionaries in my blog…
In the end, war in Syria was called off largely because Putin, for ulterior motives of his own (blocking a Saudi natgas pipeline thru Syria, preserving a Russian military base in Tartus), brokered some 11th hour diplomacy with Assad, to give up his chemical weapons.
Fourth- Obama, and lack of change in US foreign policy
My main beef with Obama is that he pretty much allowed the Bush era hawks and NeoConservatives from the State department (this includes Hillary) to continue running the show. He gets no credit from withdrawing from Iraq — as mentioned earlier, that was a done deal inherited from Bush. I would give him credit for the Syria peace deal, except he and Kerry were pushing to go to war there, so what am I supposed to think?
The way I see it, our country’s foreign policy is still being steered, from under the hood, by a largely NeoConservative crew who is blinded by the ideology of “american exceptionalism”, continued belief in effectiveness of regime change as a foreign policy tactic, a tendency to drink their own PR kool-aid in terms of framing complicated situations as “good vs evil”, and last but not least, a refusal to acknowledge that at this point in the middle east’s history, a very sizable percent of the dysfunction can be traced directly back to previous generations of US foreign policy.
I.e., both Iran and Iraq had their history COMPLETELY reshaped by US-imposed regime changes in the 1950s and 1960s, where we supported the violent overthrow of their democratic governments and gave them the Shah and Saddam, respectively. This is something every 10 year old kid over there knows in detail but we seem to forget.
There is a whole lot of facing the facts that has yet to be done on our side. Until then we are doomed to further “unanticipated complications”, “honest mistakes”, “surprises”, or whatever it will be called. At one point I hoped that Obama was going to tackle some of these issues — I no longer have such hopes.
First, as always thanks for reading and taking the time to comment.
Yeah, I’m aware of the Status of Forces agreement. Perhaps I should have been more specific in saying President Obama should have pushed for renegotiation of this agreement much harder than he did, so that we could have kept troops there. Al- Maliki is definitely complicit in this and is actually the subject of my next post. Once we went in there should have been a reckoning that we would have to stay indefinitely. Marc Thiessen wrote a critique in the Washington Post today pretty much saying that President Bush wanted otherwise, although he obviously signed this agreement (more blame for him)
Yeah I don’t disagree with your second point at all, I just feel like leaving troops there would not have been any worse for the situation (dangerous for our troops, politically tough to work out, but not worse for the situation). I’m not aware of the agreement with the Shiites to leave, but if that was the case then that does make things much more problematic. If Bush made that agreement then that’s just another reflection of his lack of understanding of the situation. If Obama made it then it reflects a lack of thinking through what the consequences of that might be.
On the third comment I just think either way you read it Obama was passive in Syria, which would not have been a problem if groups like ISIS were intent on only fighting in Syria. Once they decided that Iraq was a ripe target the lack of action in Syria became a major concern. I will say this, I was not for war in Syria until after the chemical weapons were used and then only because (in my opinion) that makes it more than “just” a civil war. But that’s kind of looking back in hindsight and saying “well knowing what we know now” maybe Obama should have been more proactive.
Fourth…well said, The Middle East is a very complex situation and I mean even if you take the 50s and 60s out of the equation, we’ve been completely reshaping Iraq’s history for the last decade. Eventually I’ll turn this series to what I think we should do, but none of this it is going to be very pretty and none of it is going to generate any type of a clean fix. We were out of Iraq when Saddam Hussein was still alive, we should have stayed out. Instead we decided to go back and that decision compounded the ones you’ve already mentioned, making this whole thing a horrific mess.