The events happened because Obama refused to negotiate with the leader of Iraq to keep our troops there.
He wanted them out no matter what. He could have easily done a deal to keep our troops under American Control but all he wanted was to fulfill his campaign promise.
This was all the terrorists was waiting for, when America would pull the troops out.
No, IRAQ was not going to negotiate a SOFA that gave American troops immunity from Iraqi laws. The SOFA Bush signed sold out our remaining sons and daughters.
Iraq: Is the SOFA viable?
The
Status of Forces Agreement between the governments of Iraq and the United States comes with outrageous
stipulations that render our troops helpless, subject them to Iraqi military tribunals, halt U.S. military operations, and turn vengeful detainees over to the Iraqis. So what is the point of leaving our troops there as potted plants for the next three years?
Anyone who thinks this SOFA is similar to that of the pacts we have with Germany or Japan is delusional. There will be no safe tours of the Iraqi countryside for our troops on R&R. The Bush Administration, in one of their last attempts to salvage some grain of positive legacy, pushed this "rush job" through so they can say: "look at how far the Iraqis have come, see, we really did liberate them." At the same time a bipartisan majority of Congress sat on their hands with the deer in the headlights look. Knowing it's going to blow up in the Obama Administration's face. You gotta love how politics works.
Mr. Obama has promised to initiate a firm time line for troop withdrawal which coincides with the SOFA. However, it won't be overnight -- it will take years. And if upon our exit from Iraq violence spikes, it is likely that the withdrawal plan will be replaced by a contingency plan that keeps our troops in harms way indefinitely.
According to the SOFA a system has to be established for Iraqi approval of all U.S. missions. Therefore, our military strategy over the next six months is to leave Iraqi cities and confine ourselves behind walls while waiting to be assigned approved missions by the Iraqi government. Every time U.S. troops leave their bases it will have to be cleared by the Iraqis -- even if they want to conduct a convoy to Kuwait for resupply purposes. Not to mention an actual combat mission to quell violence and find bad guys.
How many undercover
insurgent cells currently plague the Iraqi police and security forces? When retired Marine General James Jones and then D.C. Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey conducted their trip to Iraq to evalute the Iraqi police they
concluded that the Iraqi National Police Force is so sectarian and corrupt that the entire force should be
disbanded and rebuilt from the ground up -- it never happened.
John Bruhns is an Iraq war veteran
Iraq’s Government, Not Obama, Called Time on the U.S. Troop Presence
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.
So, while U.S. commanders would have liked to have kept a division or more behind in Iraq to face any contingencies — and, increasingly, Administration figures had begun citing the challenge of Iran, next door — it was Iraqi democracy that put the kibosh on that goal. The Bush Administration had agreed in 2004 to restore Iraqi sovereignty, and in 2005 put the country’s elected government in charge of shaping its destiny. But President Bush hadn’t anticipated that Iraqi democracy would see pro-U.S. parties sidelined and would, instead, consistently return
governments closer to Tehran than they are to Washington. Contra expectations, a democratic Iraq has turned out to be at odds with much of U.S. regional strategy — first and foremost its campaign to isolate Iran.
Time Magazine