My point...which you studiously ignore...is that Barack Obama was advised by his generals to keep a force of combat troops in Iraq but didn't want to because he planned to run for reelection as the President who ended combat operations in Iraq. That was a POLITICAL decision by Obama based not on what was needed in Iraq...but what he thought he needed to remain in office in the US!
Again, how do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake?
That is reality! Claiming that Obama couldn't have gotten another Status of Forces agreement from Maliki if he'd really wanted one is the "rewrite" of history!
Again, Maliki couldn't have gotten one because after 8 years, most Iraqis hated the Americans and wanted us gone. You seem to neglect this fact. Maliki was playing to public sentiment as much as Obama was.
You're doing so for one reason and one reason alone! You know that Obama's decision was a bad one. It allowed ISIS to seize power and become a terrorist Caliphate that raped and murdered tens of thousands of innocent people and caused a mass migration out of the Middle East that has destabilized many parts of Europe.
And why is any of that our problem? I't might be out fault for deposing Saddam to start with, but you don't fix a mistake by making more mistakes.
I'm sure you are all upset about the Devil-worshiping Yazidis, although ten years ago, you probably didn't even know what a Yazidi was.
You have yet to tell me why Obama should have gone back to American parents and say, "We are going to have more of your sons and daughters come back in body bags or without limbs or with PTSD because, gosh darn it, George W. Bush made a mistake and the Generals say we should continue on with his mistake."
That's something Barack Obama owns, Monk! You may not like it...but THAT is reality!
No, the person who owns that is George W. Bush for deposing Saddam to start with. To a lesser degree Maliki for making the decisions that turned Sunnis against him.
ISIS exists because they are Sunnis living under leaders who are Shi'ites (Assad and Maliki) and wanted their own form of government. Since the Sunnis and Shi'ites have been arguing for 1400 years about how many Imams can dance on the head of a pin, I'm not really convinced that leaving 24,000 Americans to be nice juicy targets was really going to change that.
That's a crock and you know it! Saddam violated sanctions daily! He was brokering black market oil for arms deals through the son of the UN Secretary General! You name a sanction, Saddam Hussein ignored it!
Okay, if you say so (not really) but where were the WMD's? We didn't go to war over black market oil. We went to war because Saddam had nukes and he was going to get us!!!!!