Was Obama wrong to withdraw troops from Iraq?

Did President Obama usher in Iraq’s current crisis when he withdrew all U.S. forces and shattered the stability achieved by former president George W. Bush’s “surge”? Foreign policy hawks have vigorously promoted that narrative, but their account does not withstand scrutiny. For one thing, it is now abundantly clear the Iraqi government was not “stable or self-reliant” at the end of 2011. Further, U.S. boots on the ground would not have made it so. Before the troops came home, Americans watched for eight years as the United States failed to resolve Iraq’s internal conflicts. Keeping soldiers there beyond 2011 would not have halted the political hemorrhaging.

The U.S. experience in Iraq – sometimes heartbreaking, often humbling – has echoed the hard-earned lessons of Washington’s prior adventures abroad. In a 2007 World Politics article on “nation-building,” I noted that the United States “has done best where it has done less” and “has been more effective at refurbishing and strengthening an existing state [e.g., Germany and Japan] than at laying a new foundation [e.g., South Vietnam, Haiti].” The second Bush administration aspired to break that trend, attempting to establish an orderly European-style state on the Tigris and Euphrates. Instead, the administration repeated the failures of the past. Radical regime change triggered a traumatic renegotiation of Iraqi politics, one that may take decades to play out.

When Iraq is considered alongside prior cases, it becomes clear that the current crisis dates to the entry of U.S. forces in 2003, not their departure three years ago. The most the United States has accomplished through military interventions in the developing world is to replace or reinforce local leaders, typically in missions that lasted a year or less. By contrast, longer troop commitments and more ambitious schemes of political engineering have tended to end badly. This pattern flips the current controversy on its head. Rather than thinking that U.S. leaders pulled out of Iraq too soon, future generations will likely wonder why they took so long.

Obama’s critics have cited Germany, Japan and South Korea as places where the U.S. military has been “a stabilizing force.” They contend that the lack of a similar residual troop presence (numbering between 20,000 and 30,000) caused the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to grow and the Iraqi army to fold. Such claims merit investigation: Has that hypothetical scenario ever actually happened? In modern history has a country comparable to Iraq overcome internal political divisions thanks to the United States keeping boots on the ground? Of course, to answer these questions it is important to avoid cherry-picking the record for favorable cases. One should examine not only where the U.S. military has kept residual forces for decades, but also where it left completely – after years, or months.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/06/26/was-obama-wrong-to-withdraw-troops-from-iraq/