Iraq: The Bush Legacy

Obama-hating pantywaists need only heed the reality expressed by one of their own, National Review's Andrew McCarthy. They'll persist in their bellywhinging about the American President, but a healthy dose of truth, no matter how immune they may be in their derangement, is never amiss.

 

I'm not a pantywaist but I do hate Obama.

But it's not either or.

Clearly Bush was a bad president too.

 

Sorry about your desperate need to try to absolve Obama's IDIOCY, but ISIS was not the creation og GW Bush,and Obama has been ARMING THEM for TWO YEARS.

Own it. It's YOURS.

 

Now we have Iraq, the Obama Legacy.

 

You know those people were never swayed by a set of facts....
Their process is
A) What was I told to believe?
B) What was I told the justification of that belief was?
C) Repeat the answers to A and B , ad nauseum until
D) A new set of A and B is delivered by the cult leaders

There is no "What actually happened?" in the process....

 

"... it was not Obama who agreed to the withdrawal schedule. It was President Bush. "

Yes who aquiest to Obama who had won the election and was coming into office............it was Obama's deal.


Bush's finest moment on Iraq: SOFA, not the surge

ter Beinart today bravely repeats the emerging would-be conventional wisdom. Rather than simply denounce everything Republican, he argues, Democrats should admit that the "surge" worked and -- uniquely echoing a thousand recent op-eds -- was President Bush's finest moment. I have a hard time imagining anything as tedious as rehashing those tired debates from the campaign about the "surge" -- perhaps we could have another round of arguments as to whether the surge brigades arriving in the spring of 2007 caused the Sunni turn against al-Qaeda in the fall of 2006? But in the interests of post-partisanship, I am willing to offer an alternative as Bush's finest hour in Iraq: the Status of Forces Agreement.
Signing a Status of Forces Agreement requiring the full withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq on a fixed three year timeline demonstrated a real flexibility on Bush's part. It demonstrated a pragmatism and willingness to put the national interest ahead of partisanship that few of us believed he possessed. It is largely thanks to Bush's acceptance of his own bargaining failure that Barack Obama will inherit a plausible route to successful disengagement from Iraq.

Conservatives now like to claim the SOFA as a "Bush-negotiated" success. But Bush entered the SOFA negotiations looking for something entirely different than what emerged at the end. The U.S. went into the SOFA talks intent on obtaining legitimacy for a long-term military presence in Iraq once the Security Council mandate ended. When negotiations began, it was widely assumed that Bush would extract from the Iraqis an agreement which made the removal of U.S. troops entirely contingent upon American assessments of conditions on the ground. There were widespread discussions of permanent U.S. bases and a Korea-style presence for generations, an assumption that the U.S. would retain a free hand in its operations, and an absolute rejection of an Obama-style timeline for withdrawal.

But Iraqi leaders, to most everyone's surprise, took a hard line in the negotiations. Their tough line was encouraged by Iran, no doubt, as stressed by many frustrated American commentators. But it also reflected Iraqi domestic considerations, including several rounds of upcoming elections and an intensely strong popular Iraqi hostility to the U.S. occupation under any name. The Iraqis were also helped by the calender. As negotiations dragged on, the December 31 deadline loomed large, threatening to leave the U.S. troops without any legal mandate to remain in the country and forcing the hand of American negotiators. Finally, the Iraqi leaders clearly kept a careful eye on the American Presidential elections and used Obama's stance to strengthen their own hand in negotiations.

And here's where I will offer some sincere praise for Bush and his team. When the Iraqis insisted on an Obama-style timeline for U.S. withdrawal instead of a Bush/McCain- style conditions-based aspirational time frame for U.S. withdrawal, he could have insisted on the latter. This would have fit with his administration's often-repeated preferences. He could have continued to push for this conception closer to the December 31 deadline, playing high-stakes chicken at the expense of American military planning for the coming year and at the risk of the Iraqi political system not having adequate time to ratify the deal.

But he didn't. To his credit, Bush agreed to the Obama-style timeline for U.S. withdrawal. Granted, he hedged -- he didn't authorize Ambassador Ryan Crocker to sign off on the deal until after the Presidential election (on November 1. But at that point he bowed to the political realities in the U.S. and Iraq and agreed to a SOFA which far more closely matched Obama's avowed vision for Iraq -- withdrawal of U.S. forces in three years, no permanent bases -- than his own. Thanks to this pragmatism, Obama can now work closely with the Iraqi government in managing the drawdown instead of spending his first months in office trying to wriggle out of an unacceptable deal. And this, I might speculate, is among the reasons why Robert Gates will continue as Secretary of Defense.

And thus I offer Bush's willingness to sign the SOFA mandating U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, and not the surge, as his finest moment in Iraq.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/01/18/sofa_not_the_surge

 

Good post, but many of our members are not interested in the facts.

 

This is not just a Bush War it is owned and not financed by Republicans but the American people they willfully lied to. Republicans are no better than the people and the weapons that they said Iraq were and had.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah but give them a conspiracy and watch out 20 threads a day!

 

Obama can take credit for losing what Bush won.


[video=youtube;tLteUGkvpOc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tLteUGkvpOc#t=24[/video]

 

That goes double for most libs.

 

You are really hung up on "libs".. but the facts are there regardless of your politics.

 

Facts are dismissed by them only when they wreak havoc with their dogma and their need to transfer blame to the incumbent.

Even when one rightist explains it to them in a conservative periodical, they need to deny the reality.

.

 

The SOFA was signed before the election.

 

Obama has been President almost as long as Bush was during the war. What you seem to forget is there were MANY Democrats that voted FOR the Iraq War including your potential front running candidate for President in 2016.

[video=youtube;p03k4Gq-laI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=p03k4Gq-laI[/video]

There she goes!

 

The NeoCons sold the war to the ignorant and to masses of US citizens.

 

Isn't that why they elected the brilliant Democrats to represent/protect them?

 

Since you are interested in facts does this men you aren't voting for Hillary since she voted for the war with Bush and took part in the lie? OR will you support someone who went along with the very thing you are now citing just because she is a Democrat?

 

BUUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSSSHHHHHHH!!!!!!

LMFAO!

The loony left-wing nuts wanted our troops out of Iraq and voted for a man who promised to do so and when the troops came home in 2011, the loony left-wing nuts were so over joyed that "their guy" brought our troops home and continually gave him credit for doing so and now that (*)(*)(*)(*) is hitting the fan in Iraq it is now all of the sudden Bush's fault.

You lefties need to get your heads examined.

 

Not quite. The authorization was for the use of force if required, not for war. Bush as Commander In Chief ordered the war in a bit of a rush since it was becoming clear that the United Nations inspectors were not able to find the weapons that didn't exist.

 

Obama just followed the exit timeline Bush laid out.

 

getting out of Iraq was the best move, because it was stupid going into Iraq, it was stupid staying there for all those years, and it's going to end up the same way no matter what we do.
You could argue that the longer we stayed the worse it got.
To really understand what the problem is, you have to go back to 1919.
Unfortunately for all involved, President Wilson became ill, and Versailles conference got derailed by the British and French looking to bolster Empires, so instead of one country called Syria, with Damascus as the capital, encompassing all of Arabia, which the Arabs wanted, self determination got tossed out, and the region was sliced and diced into convenient statelets, with all the bloodshed that followed.
Imagine one Arab state, there would be no Israel, because the European powers wouldn't be able to slice an Israeli state off of a Syria that included all Arabia, so they would need another gesture to assuage their guilt over the Hitler thing...
Without Israel, with a united Arab identity, there isn't a need to stir up the secular violence, the area would be far more diverse than it is now.

 

Exactly! But the loony left-wing nuts continually gave credit to Obama for bringing our troops home. You can't have it both ways.

 

Thank you for telling the reality. The fact is Pres Bush Jr did the withdrawal because the main point was that if any more US troops were to remain, they would not get immunity, hence the timetable.

These yahoos blaming Pres Obama for this is equivalent as them blaming Pres Clinton for 9/11, filled with shameless unaccountability.

 

Iraq was stable when Bush left office in January of 2009.

 

Since the pullout was always based on the conditions on the ground and no announcement of when, Obama blithely ignored all of that and now you see the results.