Not unsurprisingly, Republicans are blaming it all on President Obama and calling for military intervention.
what eye thynk: Don't even get me started on how there wouldn't be anything to blame on anybody if W. and his warmongering buddies hadn't decided to get their "war jollies" on by invading that country--under false pretenses--in the first place.
Republicans are saying we should have left a small residual force in Iraq after the 2011 American troop withdrawal. What they seem to forget is that, at that time, the Iraqis refused. They took our military training, they took our weaponry, they took our investment in their infrastructure, they took our monetary aide; but they made it very clear that Iraq was not part of the United States and they wanted to run their country by themselves. They wanted us out...period.
So now we have Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe with Sam Stein and claiming that the U.S. had a "victory" in Iraq that could have withstood the passage of time if we had left a residual force there to police it.
Ignoring the fact that Mr. McCain has forgotten that Iraq refused to allow any U.S. military personnel to remain, Mr. Stein asked an important question: "So I'm curious. What is the definition of victory? What is the definition of winning? Does it mean having a residual force basically without end date? I'm a bit confused. I want to know what victory is to you."
John McCain, (who loves to be on television but gets darn right prickly when anyone disagrees with him), replied: "I think you are confused because you didn't know what happened with the surge where we basically had the country pacified. We had a stable government in Baghdad, and we had the conflict basically...won...Now (Prime Minister) al-Maliki is very weak. Maliki got worse after we left. And again, I knew this was going to happen, because we didn't leave that force behind. And so I'm sorry about your confusion, but anybody who was there will tell you we had the conflict won."
So, Mr. McCain believes we "won;" but thinks we should have left troops there indefinitely in order to remind people of it. He thinks the government in Baghdad was stable, but then says that Maliki "got worse after we left," which begs the question, how bad was he in the first place? And how stable was this wonderful government we had created for him?
I have to say, I agree with Mr. Stein's point that it's really not a victory if you have to leave troops to enforce it indefinitely.
As for Mr. Maliki's call for the U.S. to bring military help back to his country, I would remind him that the people who created the Iraq war claim that it ended in victory. Mr. Maliki acknowledged that victory, made it clear that the leadership of his country belonged to himself and his fellow Iraqiis free of outside intervention and sent us on our merry way.
Now, thanks to his mismanagement, Iraq is broken again and Mr. Maliki wants a do-over. He seems to think that every time he has a problem, we should fix it.
Note to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki: War doesn't come with a warranty, even "victories" like W's.
what she said.
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