People claiming that the withdrawal from Iraq of U.S. forces carried out by the Obama Administration from 2010-2011 explains the rise of the terrorist group ISIS have ... ... and the rise of ISIS makes this abundantly clear and provable beyond any reasonable doubt. Ultimately, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki's policies and the dynamics of Syria's raging civil war are the clear catalysts and drivers behind current ...
...
As far as who learns from history, for now, the U.S. has a president in office now who campaigned on the fact that invading Iraq in 2003 was a colossal mistake, who, keeping this in mind, intervened only lightly in Libya and went out of his way to avoid ... ... nearly erupted into full-scale civil war, and in 2014, when ISIS nearly marched on Baghdad after taking much of the country from Maliki’s sectarian Shiite regime. Now, for the past few years, the big magnet for idealistic Muslims willing to use violence ...
... Iraqis? If anything, having U.S. forces there to support and protect his government when he was unwilling to compromise gave Maliki more cover to avoid reaching out to Sunnis and Kurds.
So by the time the Obama Administration completed the withdrawal of U.S. troops in December 2011, I had come to agree that, having spent blood and treasure to give Iraqi politicians breathing room to make politics work—the explicit stated objective of the “Surge”—while having seen no serious effort at politics ...
... his supporters and kept him and his divisiveness in power. I am certainly not arguing that the execution was flawless or perfect. But in the face of an unprecedented situation in Iraq, the Obama Administration realized that it was the divisiveness of Maliki’s politics in Iraq that needed to change for any hope for Iraq’s security in the long-run. That mean he had to change, or he had to go, and everything the U.S. did was designed to produce one of those two outcomes. Ayatollahs and tribal leaders and all manners ...
