Who's to Blame for the Mess in Iraq?

Give it a break. The situation in Japan wasn't even slightly like the situation in Iraq.

There is no God in Iraq requiring the people to follow the USA. There was no sectarian warfare going on in Japan, which was highly, highly unified.

Your suggestion that we weren't "determined" in Iraq is just a sick insult. We conquered Iraq fully and completely. We were free to do absolutely anything we wanted at that point.

And, you're still suggesting that "more toops" is a solution. But, we had more troops in Iraq, and the civil war was in high gear. You can NOT just say "more troops" - you have to state what it is that you think Bush should have had those troops doing. And, you need to have thought out why it was that Bush didn't have them doing that.

 

He should be solving the problem instead of taking a situation which was stable when he took over and making it worse.

Now, the problem is so bad it is nearly un-fixable, but the next president is going to be expected to do something about it. And he won't be able to blame Obama. Now if the next president is a she, she may be able to blame Obama.

 

Who's to blame?

Allah/Satan.

 

I blame the Bush Administration and the Republicans in Congress. They were in lock-step behind Bush. But I also blame the gutless Dems in Congress who allowed themselves to be bull rushed into accepting what they had to know was deeply flawed intelligence manufactured by the administration.

 

The day BushCo decided to de-Baathify Iraq's institutions including the officer corps. You probably expected those guys to go back to herding goats.

 

Shortly after all US troops were withdrawn by Obama, what a surprise.

 

The Iraqis. Yes, we invaded their country and upended their whole country, but since then they have elected a new government and we have trained and equipped them. It is their responsibility how they respond to threats against their sovereignty.

When do you think Obama withdrew US troops from Iraq? ISIS didn't become a problem until 2014, over two years after we left.

 

Nope. No surprise. You wanted our troops left in Iraq under the jurisdiction of the Iraqi gov't? You don't like our troops?

 

NOpe I didn't but Obama didn't even try to negotiate.

 

Good. We should not have been there, and we overstayed our welcome. It was time to leave the shiite hole.

 

Sure if you don't mind things going form bad to worse which was guaranteed once we pulled out.

 

America can't be blamed imo. They were doing the citizens a favour by being the main reason Saddam got stopped.

 

Things went bad before we went in. Time to move on.
How long should be we stay there, unwanted and intrusive? 100 yrs, 1000 yrs.

 

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” ― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/w...-not-expected-troops-would-have-to-leave.html

And yet nothing happened for nearly two and a half years after we left. How long should we be responsible for security in Iraq?

 

You know what?

I think I'm going to change my mind, and go with this:

[video=youtube;LmfVs3WaE9Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmfVs3WaE9Y[/video]

 

one of the terrorists obama set free in 2011 is now the leader of isis.

 

"The group originated as Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad in 1999, which pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2004."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant

 

The US is to blame, end of that story. In fact, the US is to blame for destabilizing the middle east, in a world where we need it to be stable.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity, especially when it is found in the rulers of he US, who are not only disconnected from the reality of the middle east, but also, and worse, disconnected from the reality in America.

 

Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry, otherwise known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was released from the Camp Bucca detention center in December 2004. Remind me who was President at that time.

 

maybe. i guess there are two different stories with two different dates when he was released.

 

Iraq might have survived a while longer had Obama been willing to leave well enough alone in Syria... But let's face it this particular powder keg was going to blow eventually no matter what. Strong men aren't immortal so depending on them as long term solutions is probably a bad idea.

By the way Obama ended the negotiations he did not even attempt to intervene personally. Next time read your own article. The negotiations began before Obama took office.

 

Long enough to finish off the crazies and not a day longer Kitchner showed what had to be done in the 1880's.

 

But our country doesn't work that way. If it did we wouldn't need a Congress and would have a true democracy where every week the people went to the polls to vote on the issues.

Why we don't have a true democracy is because most people are uninformed on the issues and most people are just to busy working so they can put a roof over their heads and feed their families.

Think about it, 1/2 of Americans are so uninformed or misinformed they shouldn't even be voting in our elections. It explains how a community organizer found himself in the White House and even he discovered the job of POTUS was larger than he was.

 

You agree that the Iraqi war was won militarily in 2008, yet you don't acknowledge that Obama politically lost the war when he became president, just as the Democrats politically lost the war in Nam. What Obama did was force America to fight again a war in the Middle East because of his political ideology. We may not go to war again while Obama is president however, I believe that it is inevitable that America will be embroiled in the war again no matter how much Americans abhor war. ISIS will successfully attack attack us in the future. They only have to be successful once no matter what the Homeland Dept. does. They've done it at least twice before successfully.

 

No, the Iraq war was won in 2003. We totally conquered Iraq within a month or so of when we invaded. Our military is absolutely astoundingly good at knocking off established governments - especially when they have decrepit military forces such as those of Saddam. What we do NOT know how to do (either here or in Vietnam) is to successfully demand that large populations behave like we tell them to behave. Somehow, they keep being interested in independence, autonomy and solutions to the problems THEY face.

Beyond that, please note that Bush had operational troops in Iraq during the Iraqi civil war. But, we did not find a way of using our troops to move Maliki to cease his disenfranchisement and lethal assaults against the Sunni population.

Bush demonstrated that having operational troops in Iraq is NOT SUFFICIENT. Bush had no solution to Maliki's assault on Sunnis. And our support for Maliki and his assaults on Sunnis lost us the help of the Sunnis that the Pentagon has long stated is an absolute requirement.

Subsequently, BUSH signed our operational troops out of Iraq before Obama became president.

If you think the problem is that we don't have operational troops in Iraq, you need to say what those troops would be doing - something that neither Bush nor the rest of the US thought of while we had significant troop levels in that country.