Don't forget to thank the unnecessary invasion, occupation along with the invading authority
You mean OIF which the majority of Democrats voted for? Oh I didn't.
being forced to accept a SOFA that set the definitive time table for our complete withdrawal in 2008, or be forced to leave the country before 2009!
Don't give me that shit, the SOFA allowed the US to keep troops in Iraq in non-combat rolls, the SOFA allowed combat troops to remain in Iraq for more than a year (Dec. 2011) after Obama pulled pulled out the last of the combat troops (Aug. 2010) and Obama could have renegotiated the SOFA when the 2008 one expired in 2011 which he didn't even attempt so spare me your revisionist history, the Iraqis came begging for US troops to return after ISIS left their Assad granted safe have and crossed from Syria into Iraq.
Furthermore; there were loopholes allowing combat troops to remain in Iraq indefinitely:
Loopholes in US-Iraq Security Pact | Geopolitical Monitor
Obama withdrew before he had to and he did so not because he was bound by the SOFA but because he ran on a campaign of snatching defeat from victory.
On the resolution to give President Bush the authority to use military force, in Oct 2002 the majority of Democrats in congress voted against the measure. A vote the president urged Congress to pass so he could add teeth to the upcoming UNSC resolution concerning a final round of unfettered inspections, which it did.
https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/122074.pdf
Here is the agreement. President Obama withdrew in Oct 2011, a few weeks early. There were no loopholes. All combat troop were pulled from the population centers by June 30 2009.
Btw Iraq could have asked us to leave at any time too.
Iraq’s Government, Not Obama, Called Time on the U.S. Troop Presence | TIME.com
In one of his final acts in office, President Bush in December of 2008 had signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqi government that
set the clock ticking on ending the war he’d launched in March of 2003. The SOFA provided a legal basis for the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq after the United Nations Security Council mandate for the occupation mission expired at the end of 2008. But it required that all U.S. forces be gone from Iraq by January 1, 2012, unless the Iraqi government was willing to negotiate a new agreement that would extend their mandate. And as Middle East historian
Juan Cole has noted, “Bush had to sign what the [Iraqi] parliament gave him or face the prospect that U.S. troops would have to leave by 31 December, 2008, something that would have been interpreted as a defeat… Bush and his generals clearly expected, however, that over time Washington would be able to wriggle out of the treaty and would find a way to keep a division or so in Iraq past that deadline.”
But ending the U.S. troop presence in Iraq was an overwhelmingly popular demand among Iraqis, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki appears to have been unwilling to take the
political risk of extending it. While he was inclined to see a small number of American soldiers stay behind to continue mentoring Iraqi forces, the likes of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, on whose support Maliki’s ruling coalition depends, were having none of it. Even the Obama Administration’s plan to keep some 3,000 trainers behind failed because the Iraqis were unwilling to grant them the legal immunity from local prosecution that is common to SOF agreements in most countries where U.S. forces are based.