File this away for the time when Obama/Clinton blame everyone else for the debacle in the Middle East.

Jennifer Rubin points out that Obama/Clinton narrative that Iraq refused to permit American troops to stay in Iraq has been debunked by former Obama administration officials:

Following the reported excerpts from former CIA chief and defense secretary Leon Panetta’s book unmasking the president and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s lack of candor (to put it mildly) over the withdrawal of troops from Iraq in 2011, comes  an interview with Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq. It includes this exchange:

Hillary Clinton. (Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

As a former ambassador to Iraq (2007-09), do you think it was a mistake not to push hard for the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq before the U.S. pullout?

I do. We could have gotten that agreement if we had been a little more persistent, flexible, and creative. But what really cost us was the political withdrawal. We cut off high-level political engagement with Iraq when we withdrew our troops.

There were no senior visits, very few phone calls. Secretary of State John Kerry made one visit prior to this current crisis, mainly to lecture the Iraqis on how bad they were being for facilitating Iranian weapon shipments to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And we left them to their own devices, knowing that left to their own devices, it would not work out well.

Crocker is simultaneously supporting Republican critics’ version of events and also indicting the administration for its refusal to use “soft power,” which the Obama team claimed had been neglected in the Bush administration. They bragged about their expert “smart diplomacy,” but they were clueless about what was going on.

These two former officials cannot be credibly attacked as partisans or out to get either Obama or Clinton. That is what makes their remarks so devastating. For Obama this is simply another piece in the puzzle of utter incompetence and then cover-up — lying, some would call it — when things went predictably wrong. But for Clinton, it poses a number of more acute problems for her presidential run.

These ex-officials have made clear the most credible people in the administration are not going to keep mum about the administration’s mistakes. (I wonder what Panetta’s book will say about Libya, Israel and more.) If Clinton continues to practice revisionist history, she will be snared — as she is now.

Second, Clinton has never claimed, as she has for Syria, that she warned against an Iraq pullout. Maybe she did, but Panetta cited his undersecretary’s role in making the case for a stay-behind force, not Clinton’s. Is she now going to “remember” to have joined Panetta, the raft of military advisers, conservative critics and lawmakers who warned Obama to leave a force in place? She should stick close to the truth, for it seems many of her former colleagues have good memories and/or reliable notes. Unless she has an alibi for this one, too, she is going to stand accused of making the same fatal error Obama did — both here and in Libya, by the way — which is ignoring the rising jihadist threat in furtherance of an ideological vision.

Panetta and Crocker provide another reminder that in the new Congress, the investigation into the relatively discrete issue of Benghazi should be folded into a larger select committee on the entire Middle East collapse. Let Panetta, Crocker and Clinton all come and testify. They can help voters decide who was on which side of the debates and what errors were made. (This was what was done after 9/11, you will remember.) This is the meat of the issue with Clinton, not Benghazi. If the voters are to hire her as commander in chief, they have every reason to demand a full accounting of whether the massive national security debacles were foreseeable, preventable and attributable to her.

Aside from these issues we know now why Michele Flournoy was not selected as defense secretary rather than the president’s pliable crony Chuck Hagel. Not only had she stood up to the president and his political hacks, but in a confirmation hearing and elsewhere she could have laid out the entire story as to how we got from a stable, functioning Iraq to the current chaos. How inconvenient that would have been.

It is a good thing that we have that smart Nobel Prize winner instead of that stupid cowboy!

Instapundit writes:

//WHEN EXCUSES DON’T WASH: On “60 Minutes,” the president faulted his spies for failing to predict the rise of ISIS. There’s one problem with that statement: The intelligence analysts did warn about the group. Says one former Intel officer: “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting.” Or both.//

It is a good thing we have that smart Nobel Prize winner as president instead of that stupid cowboy!

Leon Panetta blames Obama's total withdrawal of America troops as reason for rise of ISIS.

The nice thing about being part of the peace movement is that you never get blamed ...

...for the thousands killed when your foreign policy fails.

In the summer of 2007, Bush warned of the dire consequence of pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq against the advice of our commanders on the ground. All of Washington was telling Bush that the surge he had launched would fail and that the time had come to withdraw from Iraq and accept defeat.

At a White House news conference on July 12, 2007, Bush declared: “I know some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq now. To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we’re ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qaeda. It would mean that we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we’d allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean we’d be increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous.”

He had no idea at the time how prophetic his words would be.

In 2010, Obama did precisely what Bush warned against and withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq — overruling his commander on the ground, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, who had recommended that Obama keep 24,000 troops. And since then, everything that Bush warned would happen has come to pass.

Bush warned that withdrawing against the advice of our military commanders would result in “mass killings on a horrific scale.” Check. We’re now seeing mass killings on a horrific scale — summary executions, women and children buried alive, people being crucified, the attempted genocide of the Yazidis and two American journalists beheaded.//

The peace movement never learns because they have such good intentions.

The Prom King Presidency.
After beheading of American, Obama confesses he has no strategy for dealing with ISIS.

“I do think that it’ll be important for Congress to weigh in,” Mr. Obama said of possible action in Syria. “But I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet.”

More good news in the fight for civilization...
...1 in 6 Frenchmen prefer ISIS.

The man is never responsible for anything...

...when it goes wrong.

One good thing about the "Obama Doctrine" in Iraq...

...we will really get to see the results of the policies advocated by the peace movement.

6 times Obama was against war in Iraq.

It's a good thing that we have a Nobel Peace Prize winner, instead of that cowboy...

....because everyone respects the Lightworker and he would be able to deal with Islamic extremist by persuasion.

Obama authorizes limited airstrikes in Iraq.

Religion of Peace Update

All over the world, we read the same fargin' story.

The Islamic State’s bloody campaign to exterminate minorities: ‘Even Genghis Khan didn’t do this’

“We are being slaughtered!” she sobbed, her voice raw and worn out, as seen on this parliamentary video. “We are being exterminated! An entire religion is being exterminated from the face of the Earth. In the name of humanity, save us!”

Far away from the hotly covered regions of the world, there is an unfolding humanitarian crisis —others say emerging genocide — occurring on a dust-choked spit of earth called Sinjar Mountain. On Wednesday, reports The Washington Post’s Loveday Morris, Iraqi helicopters dropped supplies — but would they be enough?

Time to go golfing.

Obama lied, people died.

//From Europe to the Middle East, we have seen how disaster follows U.S. retreat and disengagement from the world. But the one area where President Obama seemed to be leaning forward was drone strikes. He personally approved terrorist “kill lists” and has taken out many hundreds of terrorists with drones in Pakistan, Yemen and East Africa.

So why, when Iraqi officials began pleading with him one year ago to strike Islamic State terrorists with drones, did Obama repeatedly refuse — standing by while terrorists overran the country?

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce made the stunning revelation in a congressional hearing last week that Iraq had been urgently requesting drone support against the Islamic State since August 2013 and that those requests were repeatedly turned down.

Obama officials have publicly claimed that Iraq requested air support only in May of this year, after Islamic State had already taken Fallujah and was marching on Mosul. That is untrue. And it is Royce’s version of events that is borne out by the public record. On Aug. 17, 2013, in a little-noticed story entitled “Iraq Open to U.S. Drone Strikes on Terrorists,” Bloomberg News reported that Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari was in Washington “seeking U.S. advisers, air surveillance or even drone strikes” and that “the top Iraqi diplomat’s comments are the first time he has publicly raised the possibility of working with the U.S. on anti-terrorist drone strikes.”

That was a year ago. Had Obama acted on those requests, the Islamic State offensive might very well have been stopped. The United States could have hit the terrorists while they were still in staging areas in the western Iraqi desert, away from civilians, where they were easy targets for U.S. drones. Instead Obama did nothing, while the Islamic State massed its forces, marched into Iraqi cities, and proclaimed a radical Islamic state.

Why did Obama refuse? Perhaps authorizing drone strikes against terrorists in Iraq would have been an admission that his withdrawal from Iraq had backfired — that in the absence of U.S. troops the terrorists were making a comeback. This much is certain: The president did not take the Islamic State threat seriously. In a January 2014 interview with the New Yorker, Obama glibly dismissed the Islamic State as a bunch of junior varsity terrorists who posed little danger to Iraq or the United States. “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama declared. He brushed aside the rise of the Islamic State as just internal Iraqi sectarian violence, something that is not “a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.”//

Smart Diplomacy

Dick and Liz Cheney write:

//As the terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) threaten Baghdad, thousands of slaughtered Iraqis in their wake, it is worth recalling a few of President Obama's past statements about ISIS and al Qaeda. "If a J.V. team puts on Lakers' uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant" (January 2014). "[C]ore al Qaeda is on its heels, has been decimated" (August 2013). "So, let there be no doubt: The tide of war is receding" (September 2011).

Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is "ending" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality. Watching the black-clad ISIS jihadists take territory once secured by American blood is final proof, if any were needed, that America's enemies are not "decimated." They are emboldened and on the march.

The fall of the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Tikrit, Mosul and Tel Afar, and the establishment of terrorist safe havens across a large swath of the Arab world, present a strategic threat to the security of the United States. Mr. Obama's actions—before and after ISIS's recent advances in Iraq—have the effect of increasing that threat.

On a trip to the Middle East this spring, we heard a constant refrain in capitals from the Persian Gulf to Israel, "Can you please explain what your president is doing?" "Why is he walking away?" "Why is he so blithely sacrificing the hard fought gains you secured in Iraq?" "Why is he abandoning your friends?" "Why is he doing deals with your enemies?"

In one Arab capital, a senior official pulled out a map of Syria and Iraq. Drawing an arc with his finger from Raqqa province in northern Syria to Anbar province in western Iraq, he said, "They will control this territory. Al Qaeda is building safe havens and training camps here. Don't the Americans care?"//

And:

//In the face of this threat, Mr. Obama is busy ushering America's adversaries into positions of power in the Middle East. First it was the Russians in Syria. Now, in a move that defies credulity, he toys with the idea of ushering Iran into Iraq. Only a fool would believe American policy in Iraq should be ceded to Iran, the world's largest state sponsor of terror.

This president is willfully blind to the impact of his policies. Despite the threat to America unfolding across the Middle East, aided by his abandonment of Iraq, he has announced he intends to follow the same policy in Afghanistan.//

Saddam had WMD...

...but he declared them to the UN, so it was OK?

But now the terrorists have them, so hunky-dory?

//The weapons include: mustard gas, Sarin, Tabun and VX.
The Telegraph reported:

Chemical weapons produced at the Al Muthanna facility, which Isis today seized, are believed to have included mustard gas, Sarin, Tabun, and VX.

Quote Stockpiles of chemical munitions are still stored there. The most dangerous ones have been declared to the UN and are sealed in bunkers.

Although declared, the bunkers contents have yet to be confirmed.//

The cost of Obama's incompetence keeps growing.

If Obama has lost the Socialist former Prime Minister of England...

....Tony Blair refuses to go under the Obama-legacy bus.

via Breitbart:

According to Mail Online, Blair said he understands that public opinion of the Iraq War has fallen over time but he is adamant that he and George W. Bush made the right decision in going to war there. Moreover, he insisted that the coalition he and Bush put together had “beaten” Al Qaeda in Iraq, but a combination of the U.S. withdrawal and a weak post-war Iraqi government gave “Al Qaeda-linked ISIS” the opportunity to gain a foothold.

Blair said those who try to argue that the Iraq War was the cause of Al Qaeda’s re-emergence and the current crisis in that country are making a “bizarre” contention.

Blair said: “It is bizarre to claim that, but for the removal of Saddam Hussein, we would not have a crisis.” He then cited the 2011 Arab Spring as an example of an event Hussein would have seized upon and used to provoke “a full-blown sectarian war” had he still been in power.

Meltdown in Iraq...

...explained.

OPERATIONAL MILITARY: Iraqi forces need US airpower, now. They need US special operations forces (SOF) teams to coordinate air strikes and tap US intelligence assets. First, target ISIL’s truck-borne flying columns. Air attacks devastate light vehicles in the open, and northwestern Iraq is open.  The US has US Navy carrier aircraft within range; so is NATO’s huge Incirlik air base.

The Iraqi Army claims that it stalled an ISIL column near Tikrit. With only 4,000 fighters, ISIL cannot fight an attrition battle. With US airpower providing an immense firepower advantage, Iraqi forces can kill the stalled ISIL column, and kill it quickly.

(1) In early 2004 US intelligence intercepted a letter from Iraq-based terrorist commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to his al-Qaida superiors. Zaraqwi wrote: When “the sons of this land (Iraq) will be the authority … this is the democracy. We will have no pretexts (i.e., for waging a terror war).” Anticipating strategic defeat, Zarqawi concluded his only option igniting a “sectarian war” in Iraq by waging a relentless terror war on Iraqi Shias. He believed this would “rally the Sunni Arabs” to his cause.

YouTube videos of summary executions in Mosul and reports that ISIL is imposing harsh Sharia law in areas it controls suggest ISIL intends to pursue the same desperate stratagem: igniting a Shia-Sunni civil war to shred Iraq. Out of the chaos, ISIL will then create a radical Sunni Islamic state in northern Iraq.  However, the Kurds, Turks and Jordanians won’t let it endure, nor will the Israelis. Though the Iranians will use the chaos to their advantage, they have no interest in a radical militant Sunni state on the border of the Syrian client. However, the best outcome is to kill the ISIL “caliphate” and kill it in a spectacular fashion.

(2) The Iraqi Army of 2008 was an increasingly capable force; the Operation Knights Charge in Basra was a highly successful Iraqi-planned and led attack. However, since US forces withdrew in 2011, cronyism and corruption have undermined Iraq’s military forces. Yes, Nouri al-Maliki bears the blame. Crooked armies are brittle armies; Mosul demonstrates that. Stabilizing Iraq means penalizing rule by whim (or cronies) while nurturing and strengthening the institutional Rule of Law.  An extended US security presence not only gives democratic political elements protection, it provides them with an on-the-ground Rule of Law institution to emulate.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory.


Al Qaeda is emerging victorious by force of arms in Iraq:

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaeda affiliated front of Muslims, have followed up their lightning seizure of Mosul by taking Tikrit, the former stronghold of Saddam Hussein.

In Mosul and surrounding areas, more than 150,000 troops fled their posts as the militants advanced, leaving behind thousands of weapons, including tanks and helicopters, that are now in ISIL’s possession, said Jabbar Yawer, a spokesman for ethnic Kurdish armed forces in Erbil.

The speed with which ISIL and its allies have advanced after their seizure on Tuesday of Mosul – a city of two million people – has sent alarm bells ringing not only in Baghdad but in western capitals.

The Tweets tell of a monumental collapse.  ”Jesus. “30,000 men – simply turned and ran in the face of the assault by an insurgent force of just 800 fighters … Surreal scenes in #Mosul, #Iraq as US trained troops leave behind their uniforms and flee from #ISIS to #Kurdistan. ”

Michael Yon Tweets: “Mosul: Iraq Crumbling before our eyes”. The Internet is rife with pictures of al-Qaeda triumphantly inspecting millions, perhaps billions of dollars worth of captured, American made military equipment.  It’s like Vietnam all over again, except this time the NVA are continuing the attack all the way to New York.

Unless the rot is stopped, ISIS will soon be at Baghdad’s gates and al-Qaeda’s affiliates will soon possess one, perhaps two major Middle Eastern countries plus trillions of dollars in oil resources. Libya, Iraq, perhaps Syria. They will be on the border of Saudi Arabia, able to credibly menace the energy lifeline of the Western world, a fact that can only play to Putin’s advantage.

Richard Fernandez predicted this in 2010:

To jump from the correct idea that defeating the forces which ‘attacked American on 9/11″ were an existential threat to the idea that ergo Afghanistan was a war of necessity was a huge non sequitur. Afghanistan happened to be the place from which Osama Bin launched his attack on September 11.  Admiral Nagumo launched his infamous attack on Pearl Harbor from a nameless patch of ocean 200 miles North of Oahu. But Admiral King had the sense to understand that the location itself had little significance. It was the Kido Butai, the ten carriers which made up the Japanese Fast Carrier force which momentarily occupied that ocean waste that he had to destroy. While the Kido Butai existed it could move across the vast spaces and attack at a point of its choosing. While it survived every patch of ocean was dangerous. Once it had been neutralized all the oceans of the world were potentially safe.  As John Adams in his book If Mahan Ran the Great Pacific War wrote: “sink ten ships and win the naval war”. Both the Nihon Kaigun and the CINCPAC understood this. The entire purpose of subsequent American naval operations was to find and sink these ten ships; and the Nihon Kaigun’s subsequent efforts revolved around their attempt to preserve them.

But today only one side — the forces behind al-Qaeda –  have a clear strategic conception of the war they are waging. The President seems determined to misunderstand it. He is waging existential war against tribesmen at the end of the world while denying that the Kido Butai even exists. He may succeed on narrow terms, but al-Qaeda, the modern Kido Butai, will simply move elsewhere: to Yemen, Birmingham or Detroit and the menace will remain unabated. Ralph Peters writing in the NY Post, catches the disconnection between the strategic significance of Afghanistan and the means being applied to mis-attain it. Peters complained that America isn’t fighting the forces which attacked it. It is trying to Westernize the piece of land from which the attack was launched. One is not obviously related to the other, but never mind. Like the Southwest Pacific campaign of long ago, it has taken on a political life of its own.