Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Krauthammer: Obama Surrender Brought Iraq Collapse

Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen.
Instead, it's the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who's in charge — while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America's alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in freefall.
It gets worse. The Gulf States' top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama's failed Camp David summit. "We were America's best friend in the Arab world for 50 years," laments Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief.
Note: "were," not "are."
We are scraping bottom. Following six years of Obama's steady and determined withdrawal from the Middle East, America's standing in the region has collapsed.
And yet the question incessantly asked of the various presidential candidates is not about that. It's a retrospective hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now?
First, the question is not just a hypothetical, but an inherently impossible hypothetical. It contradicts itself.
Had we known there were no weapons of mass destruction, the very question would not have arisen. The premise of the war — the basis for going to the United Nations, to the Congress and, indeed, to the nation — was Iraq's possession of WMD in violation of the central condition for the cease-fire that ended the first Gulf War.
No WMD, no hypothetical to answer in the first place.
Second, the "if you knew then" question implicitly locates the origin and cause of the current disasters in 2003. As if the fall of Ramadi was predetermined then, as if the author of the current regional collapse is George W. Bush.
This is nonsense. The fact is that by the end of Bush's tenure, the war had been won. You can argue that the price of that victory was too high. Fine. We can debate that until the end of time. But what is not debatable is that it was a victory.
Bush bequeathed to Obama a success. By whose measure? By Obama's. As he told the troops at Fort Bragg on Dec. 14, 2011, "We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people." This was, said the president, a "moment of success."
Which Obama proceeded to fully squander.
Read the rest of Krauthammer's op-ed HERE.

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