Krom wrote:Not relevant to the issue at hand? What kind of twisted logic are you operating on? It is extremely relevant! I don't think anything else could even come close to being as relevant as "The desired outcome is physically impossible.". First you need to give up your denial about the situation, there was no way the occupation was going to end well for us or for the Iraqi people, period. Game over, we lose. It was time to cut our losses and move on.
The amount of convoluted illogical mental gymnastics you are performing to somehow make this Obama's deliberate fault for sabotaging the Iraqi government is truly a sight to behold.
Sorry, I was in a hurry and I wasn't very clear. By irrelevant I was talking about how we got there, how predictable the results may have been at the time, etc.
All that is 'water under the bridge'. I reject the premise that the Iraqi's only want what they have now. But their confidence in the new regime wasn't even close to being earned so they aren't coming out with their pitchforks and knives to help sustain that which they don't know and have any reason to believe it could sustain the new paradigm. They know which way the winds blow in their part of the world and the nutbag tyrants were right there where we left them...
As I said the new Iraqi government/army/system was a decade or more away from being able to give the people hope that they were the real thing.
Look at how long we stayed in Japan, Germany, etc.
Look at South Korea. Would it still be South and North or just a singular Korea ruled by a nutbag if we weren't there? It isn't because the Koreans in the south
'don't want' to be kept from joining their brothers in the north. It is just that if we had left they wouldn't have been able to repel the north.
No matter how ill advised the Iraqi war was with the benefit of hindsight, in 2011, we, Obama, decided we needed to let it crumble into chaos.
It doesn't matter that it made sense in 2008. That is irrelevant.
I was in favor of pulling out of Iraq when they hesitated (because of the looming mid term elections) going into Fallujah, before we ever found Saddam. I knew then that the political will to do the right thing long term was lost! I said so here a day or two after that happened.
Things have changed drastically since then. In no small part due to Obama's other foreign policy missteps. Libya, Syria, Putin and the general growth of the 'terrorists' that he told us were decimated. Lol!
Letting the country of Iraq crumble into a power struggle is no longer letting a single country fight it out from within. It is offering the whole region up to the winning warlord/cleric/tribe. And they have been waiting and sharpening their swords for this day since Obama told them they were going to have their chance at it. He marked their calendars for them! We broke all the eggs in the carton and now someone is going to cook the omelette. We should be in the kitchen because we are going to have to eat what ever comes out of it.
What we are experiencing is the result of Chicago politics applied to the outside world where the players aren't swayed for one skinny second by his rhetoric.
The american media can't prop him up high enough to fool anyone from those cultures where he thinks he can bomb them but he cares because he went to their schools and his half sister is muslim.
Completely out of his element and our 'foreign policy' is the product of that. Hillary was 'given' the Sec. of State job, not because america needed her great skills in that arena, but because of domestic party politics! That how selfish and short sighted Obama's 'foreign policy decisions are. Kerry is picking up the role probably because he's the only one with enough ego to blind him to the disaster he is inheriting.
The coming reshaping of the middle east is as much a result of Obama's policy as it is our going in there in 2003.
