A caller to my show this morning asked me, if I had been president, what I would be doing to counter the ISIS threat. It's a fair question, and here's the answer:
If I was president, we would not be in this mess, because I would have heeded the warnings of George W. Bush. Rob
showed you the video recently of Bush's eerie 2007 warning about what would happen if we pulled out of Iraq when it was not safe to do so. That is exactly what Obama did. Despite the fact that Iraq in 2011 appeared to be heading in the right direction, it was still essential that we negotiate a status of forces agreement so we could keep U.S. forces in the country.
This would not have been a radical move. We have status of forces agreements with more than 100 countries. We certainly should have one with Iraq. The reason we do not is not because, as Obama claims, the Iraqis insisted on unacceptable terms that would have exposed U.S. service people to possible legal jeopardy in Iraq. That was merely Obama's excuse to abandon what he already wanted to abandon.
The real reason is that Obama became so politically invested in the idea of having no forces in Iraq, ever, for any reason, that even signing a simple status of forces agreement became politically untenable to him. He desperately wanted to announce that all U.S. forces had left Iraq, and he could not figure out how to do that while working out an agreement to keep some of them there.
So Obama abandoned Iraq, completely ignoring the warnings of his predecessor that doing so would expose Iraq to even more dangerous threats, and ultimately would force our people back in there to fight yet again - which is the very thing he'll be addressing the nation about tonight.
If I had become president, I would have immediately re-started talks with Iraq in the pursuit of a status of forces agreement, and we would have achieved one. ISIS, whom Obama thought until recently was merely Al Qaeda's "JV team" (in spite of warnings from his own national security experts telling him otherwise), would never have had a chance to make an incursion into Iraq.
George W. Bush was right about all this, and I would have taken advantage of his wise warnings and done what was necessary to protect and strengthen the nation we had already worked so hard to rebuild and stabilize.
But for Barack Obama, it is more important to do the opposite of whatever George W. Bush did. How's that workin' out for ya?
