Author Topic: What's wrong with U.S. foreign policy?  (Read 1132 times)

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Offline waldo

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Re: What's wrong with U.S. foreign policy?
« Reply #15 on: June 17, 2019, 12:12:52 am »
Obama pulled US troops out of Iraq too quickly before Iraq was able to take over, creating the vacuum that helped let ISIS be created and take over the northern part of the country and launch attacks into Syria.

almost on par with Trump declaring, "Obama as the founder of ISIS"!

The ISIS Creation Myth

Quote
By 2008, the surge and the Awakening—as the Iraqi effort is commonly known—had driven Al-Qaeda militants into neighboring Syria, quelling much of the violence in Iraq. Bush then negotiated an agreement, which was approved by the Iraqi parliament, giving U.S. forces permission to remain in the country until 2011, along with immunity from arrest and prosecution.

That approval proved temporary. As the U.S. prepared to send the bulk of its troops home, Obama began negotiating a similar accord. His goal was to leave behind 5,000 soldiers to train the Iraqis and help with counterterrorism. But the negotiations didn't go well. Not only did Muqtada al-Sadr, the fiercely anti-American Shiite cleric, threaten to unleash his militia on any remaining U.S. troops, but the new government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was forced to acknowledge that most Iraqis wanted the occupation to end.

"Having foreign troops in your country is…an unnatural act," says James Jeffrey, who served as Bush's deputy national security adviser and Obama's ambassador to Iraq. "Giving them legal immunity is...even more unnatural. Because Iraq was a now parliamentary democracy, this required parliamentary approval. And parliament was simply not willing to give it."

With time running out, Obama ended the negotiations. By the end of 2011, all American troops were out of Iraq, and the president ran for re-election partly on his pledge to end the Iraq War. Soon afterward, however, al-Maliki, a Shiite, launched a sectarian campaign against Iraqi Sunnis, arresting senior officials for treason, driving others into exile and upending the fragile sectarian balance the U.S. occupation had enforced.

Three years later, al-Maliki had so thoroughly alienated Sunnis that when ISIS fighters began to slip across the border from Syria, they found a receptive ear in some Sunni areas for their anti-Shiite beliefs. Last summer, when ISIS troops swept into the country's northwest, Iraqi soldiers ran away, and Sunnis greeted the militants with the traditional Arab gifts of rice and flowers.