Ramadi's Bloody Fall to IS is Obama's Failure

 

IBDEditorials.com

Displaced Iraqis from Ramadi walk to Baghdad after fleeing fighting in Ramadi on May 16, 2015. AP

War On Terror: Whatever you think about the Iraq War, it's more than sad to learn our hard-won victory in Ramadi has been handed back to terrorists. Hundreds have paid with their lives for our leaders' incompetence.

'We're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq." Or so President Obama declared on Dec. 14, 2011. The removal of the last troops from that country, he said, was a "moment of success."

Those words in retrospect were false — part of a manufactured feel-good moment that right away became engulfed by the harsh new reality in the Mideast.

In fact, President Bush's surge had worked. In 2008 Anbar Province — whose provincial capital, Ramadi, fell over the weekend to ISIS — was largely quiet, and the Islamists had been defeated in battle after battle.

But it all came at a very high price. As Jim Hoft of the Gateway Pundit blog site notes, 1,335 U.S. soldiers died while liberating Anbar Province during Iraqi Freedom, and another 8,205 soldiers were injured, maimed or crippled in the fighting.

So, when Obama spoke in 2011, he was right in a sense: Iraq was, by and large, at peace, thanks to Bush's surge. What happened next? In a word, IS.

All those terrorists vanquished by the U.S. came back to fill the vacuum left by Obama's foolish troop withdrawal. By 2014, IS controlled both Fallujah and Abu Ghraib. Now, a year later, it has taken Ramadi.

Today Iraq itself is at grave risk of falling to terrorists. Yet, apart from U.S.-led bombings of IS targets, the U.S. is doing little. The resulting carnage is appalling.

An Iraqi government official said Sunday that 500 Iraqi citizens and soldiers were killed in and around Ramadi, either by fighting or by executions, as the city fell. Some 8,000 refugees have fled. Those who stay behind will find no mercy from IS fighters.

"Bodies, some burned, littered the streets as local officials reported the militants carried out mass killings of Iraqi forces and civilians," the Associated Press reports.

But worst of all, the sacrifice of our troops and their families to give Iraq a chance at having a civil society has been thrown away by our president.

"The greater amount of angst in the military is from seeing the manifest positive results of the surge in 2007 and 2008 go to waste by misguided policies in the aftermath," retired Army Col. Peter Monsoor, a top aide to Gen. David Petraeus during the surge, told AP.

Knowing this, what parents would want their sons to serve in combat — especially if they knew their sacrifice would be betrayed by their country's own leaders?

Finger-pointers are busy blaming Bush for this disaster. But it's Obama's conduct of the war that is the disaster. He walked away from Bush's success, believing he could fight at arms-length with drones and bombers.

As we now know, that's just not the case, and ultimately it will lead to terrorists taking over Iraq and much of the Mideast. Even worse, it will mean the sacrifice of thousands of young Americans who served their nation proudly and well — and who, this Memorial Day, deserve to be thanked rather than forgotten or pitied.