It's conventional wisdom that the Iraq War was a disaster, and on a certain level that's true, but not for the reason most people think.
In the 11 years since the U.S. invasion, Iraq went from a brutal dictatorship to a fledgling democracy brimming with hope to an unstable state overrun by a terrorist cabal - not because the U.S. invaded, but because the politics of the invasion and the war became so absurd in the United States. The politics led to insane policy decisions in Washington, all based on the set-in-hard political narrative that fighting in Iraq is the most horrible thing America can possibly be involved with.
The irresponsible people who successfully promoted this narrative, and their own political ascendency as a result, found themselves in power. Once there, they felt the need to protect their power by getting out of Iraq - completely and totally - at the earliest opportunity, regardless of th its implications on U.S. national security or the stability of the region.
All this matters because, in 2011, the sensible move for the U.S. would have been to negotiate a status of forces agreement to keep troops in Iraq - as we have in place with more than 100 other nations. A status of forces agreement is not a big deal. It does not mean we are attempting to build an "empire" as some of the more paranoid and hysterical among us claim. It simply means we maintain a presence where it is in the mutual interest of ourselves and another country to do so.
Barack Obama would have you believe that we tried to negotiate such a deal with Iraq, but the Iraqis made this impossible by refusing the crucial condition that U.S. troops by immune from prosecution for crimes against Iraqi law - as is also typical in such agreements. Those of us at this site have long believed this claim was nonsense - that the Iraqis may well have taken that stance as an opening negotiating position, but that any reasonable level of skill and effort in negotiations would have yielded an acceptable deal. The truth, we believe, is that Obama used this issue as an excuse to abandon the talks because what he really wanted - because of the political dynamics described above - was to completely abandon Iraq.
Now comes Leon Panetta, who was Secretary of Defense at the time, to confirm our suspicions in total:
In an excerpt from his memoir published this week on the Time magazine website, Mr. Panetta tells a different story. He relates that "privately, the various leadership factions in Iraq all confided that they wanted some U.S. forces to remain as a bulwark against sectarian violence. But none was willing to take that position publicly, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki concluded that any Status of Forces Agreement, which would give legal protection to those forces, would have to be submitted to the Iraqi parliament for approval."
That made negotiations harder, but as Mr. Panetta relates "we had leverage," such as withdrawing reconstruction aid. The White House refused to use it: "My fear, as I voiced to the President and others, was that if the country split apart or slid back into the violence that we'd seen in the years immediately following the U.S. invasion, it could become a new haven for terrorists to plot attacks against the U.S. Iraq's stability was not only in Iraq's interest but also in ours. I privately and publicly advocated for a residual force that could provide training and security for Iraq's military."
Mr. Panetta says he and his deputies pressed this argument, "but the President's team at the White House pushed back, and the differences occasionally became heated. . . . [T]hose on our side viewed the White House as so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.
"We debated with al-Maliki even as we debated among ourselves, with time running out. . . . To my frustration, the White House coordinated the negotiations but never really led them" and "without the President's active advocacy, al-Maliki was allowed to slip away."
This is all so obvious, and always has been. Obama bragged constantly on the campaign trail in 2012 that he had gotten us out of Iraq. And the ability to make that boast in his re-election campaign is exactly why he got us out - exactly why he refused to seriously pursue that status of forces deal. He had promised in his initial campaign to get us out. Obama doesn't always keep his promises - not by a long shot - but he would keep this one because he perceived it to be very much in his interests to do so, and because he cared nothing for Iraq or for our real interests in that region.
If we'd had a reasonable size force in Iraq, ISIS would never have been able to overrun the country
If we'd had a reasonable size force in Iraq, ISIS would never have been able to overrun the country and we would not now need to go back to war to roll back their advances. Quite a few people would still be alive and still have their heads. Barack Obama is directly responsible for this because he put domestic politics over the real security needs of the nation and the region when he walked away from status of forces talks in 2011. He is not a serious leader. He cannot make a good decision on any matter unless the goal is the marketing of himself. It is the only thing he knows how to do well.
By the way, let me expand a little on why I said what I did at the beginning about the Iraq War. Clearly the fight became very difficult - more difficult than the Bush White House expected. But the idea was always to replace a despot in the heart of the Middle East with a democratic regime as part of a larger effort to introduce stability in the region and deny terrorists their safe havens and staging platforms. No one should be surprised that the terrorists fought back, and that the battle became challenging. Just because that happened doesn't mean the ultimate objective could not have been achieved, or that it could not be achieved even now.
The problem came when America's political environment turned so decisively against the fight that it became basically impossible for political leaders to advocate sticking with it. Donald Rumsfeld predicted at the beginning that the War on Terror would be a "long, hard slog," and he wasn't wrong. He said that to prepare the nation for what was to come so Americans wouldn't lose their nerve when the fight dragged on and saw difficult days.
But the warning wasn't sufficient. America did lose its nerve. Politics replaced resolve. The American public became so foolish that it was even willing to elect an unserious poseur like Barack Obama, who would make strategic decisions that reflected the nation's skittishness rather than the sober judgment of a real leader.
That's how we got where we are today. Nice job, voters.
