Obama Now Blames Iraq for His Iraq Blunders

 

IBDEditorials.com

President Obama pauses Monday as he speaks about developments in Iraq, from his vacation residence in Chilmark, Mass., during his family vacation in Martha's Vineyard. AP

Leadership: Lashing out at critics who say his hasty Iraq retreat led to its violent near-collapse to al-Qaida, Obama now claims he left reluctantly, that Baghdad forced his hand. Nice try.

Asked at Saturday's South Lawn presser if he has any "second thoughts" about pulling all ground troops from Iraq, the president shot back, "What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps coming up, as if this was my decision.

"Let's just be clear," he asserted, "the reason we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq was because the Iraqis were — a majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there, and politically they could not pass the kind of laws that would be required to protect our troops."

So any suggestion that his actions are to blame for the spiraling violence in Iraq, he huffed, is "bogus" and "wrong."

In fact, the record is clear that Obama came into office promising to withdraw all troops within 16 months, a vow that his campaign chief called "rock solid."

He didn't pull them out to "protect" them in the absence of a status of forces agreement or any other malarkey but simply "to end this war" and appease his liberal base. Let's review his remarks:

July 3, 2008: "My first day in office, I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war. ... (It would be) a strategic error for us to maintain a long-term occupation in Iraq."

July 14, 2008: "Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis' taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country."

July 14, 2008: "We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. ... That would not be a precipitous withdrawal."

December 2008: "I said that I would remove our combat troops from Iraq in 16 months. ... I believe that 16 months is the right time frame."

October 2011: "A few hours ago, I spoke with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. ... We are in full agreement about how to move forward. So today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year."

In an October 2012 presidential debate with GOP candidate Mitt Romney, Obama actually denied wanting a force protection agreement from the Iraqi government.

"That's not true," Obama interjected. "Oh, you didn't want a status of forces agreement?" Romney asked.

"No," Obama said. "What I would not have done is left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down. That certainly would not help us in the Middle East."

Now that everyone can see how necessary those troops were, he refuses to own that decision.

His scapegoating of the Iraqi government for his premature withdrawal shows that his leadership is even weaker than we thought.