President Who Pulle U.S. Troops Out of Iraq Say Idea He Pulled Troops Out of Iraq is "Bogus"
By Katie Pavlich
TownHall.com
In 2008 then Senator Obama campaigned on the
promise of ending the war in Iraq and bringing
combat troops home. In 2012, Obama touted that
promise as complete (one of the only campaign
promises he actually kept) and critics warned
leaving Iraq without a residual U.S. force would
result in a power vacuum and vulnerable state. Now
as the country falls apart and the radical Islamic
State army continues its march unchallenged in Iraq,
Obama is claiming he wasn't the one who made the
decision to pull U.S. combat troops out of the
country and that claims to the contrary are "bogus
and wrong."
Q Mr. President, do you have any second thoughts
about pulling all ground troops out of Iraq? And
does it give you pause as the U.S. -- is it doing
the same thing in Afghanistan?
THE PRESIDENT: What I just find interesting is the
degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if
this was my decision. Under the previous
administration, we had turned over the country to a
sovereign, democratically elected Iraqi government.
In order for us to maintain troops in Iraq, we
needed the invitation of the Iraqi government and we
needed assurances that our personnel would be immune
from prosecution if, for example, they were
protecting themselves and ended up getting in a
firefight with Iraqis, that they wouldn’t be hauled
before an Iraqi judicial system.
And the Iraqi government, based on its political
considerations, in part because Iraqis were tired of
a U.S. occupation, declined to provide us those
assurances. And on that basis, we left. We had
offered to leave additional troops. So when you hear
people say, do you regret, Mr. President, not
leaving more troops, that presupposes that I would
have overridden this sovereign government that we
had turned the keys back over to and said, you know
what, you’re democratic, you’re sovereign, except if
I decide that it’s good for you to keep 10,000 or
15,000 or 25,000 Marines in your country, you don’t
have a choice -- which would have kind of run
contrary to the entire argument we were making about
turning over the country back to Iraqis, an argument
not just made by me, but made by the previous
administration.
So let’s just be clear: The reason that we did not
have a follow-on force in Iraq was because the
Iraqis were -- a majority of Iraqis did not want
U.S. troops there, and politically they could not
pass the kind of laws that would be required to
protect our troops in Iraq.
Having said all that, if in fact the Iraqi
government behaved the way it did over the last
five, six years, where it failed to pass legislation
that would reincorporate Sunnis and give them a
sense of ownership; if it had targeted certain Sunni
leaders and jailed them; if it had alienated some of
the Sunni tribes that we had brought back in during
the so-called Awakening that helped us turn the tide
in 2006 -- if they had done all those things and we
had had troops there, the country wouldn’t be
holding together either. The only difference would
be we’d have a bunch of troops on the ground that
would be vulnerable. And however many troops we had,
we would have to now be reinforcing, I’d have to be
protecting them, and we’d have a much bigger job.
And probably, we would end up having to go up again
in terms of the number of grounds troops to make
sure that those forces were not vulnerable.
So that entire analysis is bogus and is wrong. But
it gets frequently peddled around here by folks who
oftentimes are trying to defend previous policies
that they themselves made.
Right, pulling all U.S. troops from Iraq had nothing
to do with Obama's political aspirations and
promises. Pretty incredible. On the issue of Obama
claiming the Iraqi's and Maliki "not wanting U.S.
troops there," and "wouldn't agree to a status of
forces agreement," Obama hardly tried to get an
agreement done in the first place. Obama took the
easy way out on the agreement in order to fulfill a
campaign promise and to satisfy his base.
Here's a flashback from 2010, when Obama took credit
for the troop pull-out in Iraq.
But, the idea that Obama had anything to do with the
troop pullout is totally bogus right?
And another from 2011:
You get the point.
President Obama wants to be responsible for what
makes him look good in a short term moment and
conveniently shoves off the bad and real decision
making on everything and everyone else.