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Purveyor

(29,876 posts) Thu Jun 12, 2014, 05:40 PM Jun 2014

Militants on March in Iraq Undo What U.S. Sought

By Nicole Gaouette Jun 12, 2014 11:45 AM ET

Islamic militants’ sweep through northern Iraq and the collapse of the Iraqi army threaten to undo whatever was accomplished after the U.S. invaded the country and ousted dictator Saddam Hussein 11 years ago.

America and Europe now face the creation of a de facto militant Sunni Islamic state along the Syrian-Iraqi border that can serve as a safe haven and training zone for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a group with a declared interest in attacking the West that no country in the region can control.

For U.S. President Barack Obama, who’s built his foreign policy legacy on ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the militants’ swift victories raise questions about his 2011 decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq and his reluctance to help arm moderate Syrian rebels fighting Sunni extremists in that country.

“Now, in the middle of the Middle East, we have a big, gaping hole where the Iraqi-Syrian border has broken down,” said Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It’s a threat to the regional security architecture, the boundaries of the region we’re invested in, and a threat to a lot of the assets we’ve built up inside Iraq.”

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-12/militants-on-march-in-iraq-undo-what-u-s-sought.html

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Militants on March in Iraq Undo What U.S. Sought (Original Post) Purveyor Jun 2014 OP

This is entirely backwards, of course. JayhawkSD Jun 2014 #1

JayhawkSD

(3,163 posts)

1. This is entirely backwards, of course.

Reply to Purveyor (Original post)

Fri Jun 13, 2014, 01:38 AM

Jun 2014

"...the militants’ swift victories raise questions about his 2011 decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq."

Lord, I get tired of correcting this revisionist history, of Obama supporters who want to give him credit and haters who want to give him blame, neither of which he deserves. One more time, the decision was not his. The agreement that resulted in all troops being withdrawn was reached in 2008 between Nuri al Maliki and George W. Bush.

All Obama did was allow that agreement to be carried out, and he tried not to do that. For two years he negotiated with al Maliki trying to reach an agreement which would allow our troops to remain longer and he failed. If he had been able to get his way our troops would have remained, but he did not get his way and so the Bush agreement to withdraw all troops was carried out on schedule.

Further more, the claim that the "Islamic militants’ sweep through northern Iraq and the collapse of the Iraqi army threaten to undo whatever was accomplished after the U.S. invaded the country and ousted dictator Saddam Hussein 11 years ago," is backwards, because it was our invasion which destabilized the entire region and made the conquest by ISIS possible.

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