Obama ended the war on Bush's timetable but not on Bush's conditiosn. He was free to renegotatiate the treaty but chose instead to withdraw helter skelter, against the advice of his own SecDef and others.
That didnt prevent him from taking credit for the withdrawal when things looked good.
Or blame Bush for the withdrawal when things went bad.
In all Obama takes credit for others' achievments and blames others for his own failures.
They were EXACTLY Bush's conditions...Bush SIGNED those conditions...
What EXACTLY did you expect Obama to say when the BUSH SOFA ended on January 1, 2012? Did you want him to say that we are leaving Bush's mess to the Iraqis? Obama covered Bush's ass...
Some folks disagree with you...ISIS and George W. Bush...
The Muslim terrorist group, ISIS,
issued a statement attributing their success to the Iraq war, and they had John McCain to thank for it. In the statement they wrote:
…the crusader John McCain came to the Senate floor to rant irritably about the victories the Islamic State was achieving in Iraq.
He forgot that he himself participated in the invasion of Iraq that led to the blessed events unfolding today by Allah’s bounty and justice.
ISIS Praises John McCain For Helping Them Invade Iraq - Walid Shoebat
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
George W. Bush has only one regret about invading Iraq: that it paved the way for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Read more: Bush One regret about Iraq - Kendall Breitman - POLITICO.com
Didnt bother to read the OP, I see. Obama fucked up. He left Iraq without thinking about future security needs. This allowed ISIS to arise and take over half the state. Then he fucked up a second time and allowed Assad to keep his chemical weapons after setting a red line. Then ISIS got the chem weapons from Assad and used them on the Kurds,our only real ally in that shithole, thus compounding his first two failures.
NO, Obama left Iraq because he would not put our sons and daughters in a shithole without immunity.
OBVIOUSLY you WOULD throw our troops to the wolves...
That contradicts what 2 SecDefs under Obama have written, along with the OP.
You want to try again with something with more credible?
How about the Ambassador to Iraq?
Wall Street Journal
The Obama administration was willing to “roll over” the terms of the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement as long as the new agreement, like the first, was ratified by the Iraqi Parliament.
Iraqi party leaders repeatedly reviewed the SOFA terms but by October 2011 were at an impasse. All accepted a U.S. troop presence—with the exception of the Sadrist faction, headed by the anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which held some 40 of Iraq’s 325 parliamentary seats. But on immunities only the Kurdish parties, with some 60 seats, would offer support. Neither Mr. Maliki, with some 120 seats, nor former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the leader of the largely Sunni Arab Iraqiya party with 80 more, would definitively provide support. With time running out, given long-standing U.S. policy that troops stationed overseas must have legal immunity, negotiations ended and the troop withdrawal was completed.
Given the success in winning a SOFA in 2008, what led to this failure? First, the need for U.S. troops was not self-evident in 2011. Iraq appeared stable, with oil exports of two million barrels a day at about $90 a barrel, and security much improved. Second, politics had turned against a troop presence; the bitterly anti-U.S. Sadrists were active in Parliament, the Sunni Arabs more ambivalent toward the U.S., and polls indicated that less than 20% of the Iraqi population wanted U.S. troops.
Could the administration have used more leverage, as many have asserted? Again, the main hurdle was immunities. The reality is that foreign troops in any land are generally unpopular and granting them immunity is complicated. In a constitutional democracy it requires parliament to waive its own laws. An agreement signed by Mr. Maliki without parliamentary approval, as he suggested, would not suffice. (The legal status of the small number of “noncombat” U.S. troops currently redeployed to Iraq is an emergency exception to usual SOFA policy.)
Some suggest that the U.S. could have made economic aid or arms deliveries contingent on a Status of Forces Agreement. But by 2011 the U.S. was providing relatively little economic aid to Iraq, and arms deliveries were essential to American and Iraqi security. Was the 5,000 troop number too small to motivate the Iraqis? No Iraqi made that argument to me; generally, smaller forces are more sellable. Could someone other than Mr. Maliki have been more supportive, and were the Iranians opposed? Of course, but with or without Mr. Maliki and Iranians we faced deep resistance from parliamentarians and the public.
Could a residual force have prevented ISIS’s victories? With troops we would have had better intelligence on al Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS, a more attentive Washington, and no doubt a better-trained Iraqi army. But the common argument that U.S. troops could have produced different Iraqi political outcomes is hogwash. The Iraqi sectarian divides, which ISIS exploited, run deep and were not susceptible to permanent remedy by our troops at their height, let alone by 5,000 trainers under Iraqi restraints.
Mr. Jeffrey, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq (2010-12) and Turkey (2008-10), among other posts.
