freeman3 wrote:We're supposed to examine the problems in the Middle East and ignore the prime culprit?
1. You've got to make the case that GWB is "the prime culprit." AND
2. You've got to make the case that what he did was so egregious that Obama cannot be held responsible for his own actions.
Good luck.
The Iraq war destroyed Iraq as a nation state, which also had the effect of getting rid of the major effective counter-weight to Iran.
Mostly true. However, it does not deal with the legal legitimacy of invading Iraq. Look it up. Iraq signed a ceasefire and violated it innumerable times. Violating a ceasefire is a
casus belli in and of itself. Whether or not it was "right," it was legitimate.
The war also exhausted our troops and finances and the only way to keep Iraq stable was by indefinite keeping of a substantial force in Iraq. The American people in good part elected Obama to get us out of Iraq. Without the Iraq War you don't have ISIS and you probably don 't have the Syrian conflict.
Taken to its logical conclusion, you just blamed the election of Obama for the existence of ISIS. I accept your logic.
Let's recap:
(1) Without Bush's absurd decision to invade Iraq there is no ISIS;
Actually, according to you: ". . . the only way to keep Iraq stable was by indefinite keeping of a substantial force in Iraq." So, had we done so--ISIS never gets into Iraq and maybe never becomes significant.
Of course, you also ignore Obama's "red line" and the atrocities of Assad, the man the Administration saw as a "reformer" and someone they could work with.
(2) Iran would not be as much of a threat because they had to worry about Iraq;
They would still have been pursuing a nuclear weapon. They still would have been funding terror and the attacks on Americans in Afghanistan.
(3) Without ISIS (and other Islamic extremists fueled by the Iraq War) do we have a Syrian conflict (at least to this extent)
Without the fecklessness of Obama, we would not see ISIS or the Russians in Syria.
(4) a non war-torn Iraq would not have tolerated Iran getting a nuclear weapon so we might have been able to put more pressure on Iran.
This is made up from whole cloth.
Obama inherited an incredible, probably unfixable mess unless we were willing to lose a lot of men and money. Which most Americans were not willing to do. We're getting oil, terrorist attacks have been somewhat minor, and our military casualties are low. But chicken hawks want to send other people (not them or their families of course) to die 10,000 miles away because American pride is at stake. Forget that.
Obama knew what he was inheriting. If he couldn't handle it, he should not have run. In particular, he should not have run for reelection. What kind of insanity would it be to realize you can't fix the situation and yet take 4 more years of making it worse?
About "American pride," what nonsense. Do you recall the justification for ousting Qaddaffi? It was because 10,000 "might" die in a civil war.
Look at what has resulted from Obama's paralysis in Syria--it makes a joke of the "concerns" that led to our attacks on Libya.
Furthermore, the only reason Syria is like it is and Yemen went south is because Obama has been afraid to upset Iran. It's only by playing nice with Iran that Obama could get a deal on nuclear arms. That is his legacy, so it takes precedence over everything else.
We fight to keep the oil flowing and if it looks like Iran is going to get a nuclear bomb we take out all of their nuclear facilities. And keep doing what we're doing to contain ISIS. That 's it. And the deal with Iran was pretty much the best we could have gotten unless you think either (1) Iran would have caved, or (2) European countries would have continued sanctions indefinitely, or (3) we should have bombed Iran's nuclear facilities. Do you think any of those three things were realistically possible ( or, in the case of military action, wise? )
We are not containing ISIS. There's ample complaining by intel specialists that political pressure is pruning the intelligence reports from the field. We're making zero progress against ISIS--and the hundreds of thousands fleeing Syria are ample testimony to that.
What should we have done? Well, I'd start by saying the obvious: we should not have predicated everything by telling Iran what we would not do. We virtually guaranteed them up front that they would get most of what they wanted. In the end, they could hardly have gotten more. Team Obama deserves an 'F' in negotiations.
22 Sep 2015, 2:47 pm 
