In all fairness it was the Shia led Iraq Government who set the timetable. Neither Bush nor Obama had much of a choice but to pull the troops.
Maliki wanted the troops to stay. Obama offered him too few. Iraq wanted 20,000 and trainers.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said opponents are lying when they say the Iraqi government did not want a continued troop presence in the country when U.S. combat missions ended in 2011.
The Arizona senator has blamed the current militant Sunni uprising in Iraq on the failure of the United States to secure a status of forces agreement in 2011. He said some Democrats are trying to explain that away by inaccurately claiming the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not want troops to remain.
"Opponents and those who want to justify this colossal failure that has caused the greatest threat to United States's national security since the end of the Cold War, they're trying to justify it by saying that Maliki didn't want American troops there," he told PBS on Wednesday night.
And here is the key to how the negotiations fell apart. And the problem wasn't the Iraqis.
McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) were in direct talks with the Iraqi government at the time, McCain said, and Iraq was ready for a deal before the number of troops the United States proposed leaving fell sharply.
"What Senator Kaine is saying is just totally false," McCain said. "In fact, it's a lie, because Lindsey Graham and I were there."
"The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself said that the number of troops that we were proposing cascaded down to 3,000, when it had been recommended to be 20,000," McCain added.
He said Iraq, at that point, determined an agreement “wasn't worth the problem.”
https://thehill.com/policy/international/209887-mccain-opponents-lying-about-iraq-historyAh jeeze McCain? Really? He was there, negotiating?
The same McCain.
A tweet from McCain's account in 2010 stated, "Last American combat troops leave Iraq. I think President George W. Bush deserves some credit for victory."
John McCain Contradicts Himself On Iraq Victory
As Paul Waldman of The Washington Post notes, there is reason to take McCain and other Republicans' criticism of Obama with a grain of salt: they were often wrong about Iraq when the case was being made for the invasion of 2003.
As Lurch from the Adam's family use to say....."ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"
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