Maggie's Farm

Normally I'd leave this link for the morning compendium, but this is too important to be mixed in with others.

After 9-years of US sacrifices, President Obama's rush for the exits in Iraq and the incompetence of his administration is seen again, with very probable bad consequences for Iraq's ability to withstand internal discord and external influence from Iran. The US is left with little but a likely buffer protecting Iranian interests and a sanctions evasion route that allows Iran greater freedom from Western pressure. Once again, each time over and over, Obama blows US interests into the crapper.

Read it and weep. How the Obama administration bungled the Iraq withdrawal negotiations. Also, read Obama abandons Iraq.

Morning Postscript: Carl Cannon makes the case that "The Obama Doctrine, Made Plain at Last in Libya, Iraq": The administration "They preferred to frame the events of the week in ways that play into a domestic, election-season narrative: Namely, Barack Obama made promises regarding foreign policy, and kept them....Distilled to its essence, this approach envisioned an American foreign policy that was less militaristic, less confrontational, and less-unilateral than that of his predecessor."

Fred and Kimberly Kagan, however, call it "Retreat With Our Heads Held High", as the Obama administration's veil for failure to meet even newly President Obama's criteria for US goals in Iraq, citing his speech of February 2009. I'll quote them at length to see how Obama or his defenders should hang their heads in shame:

The humiliation of this retreat is compounded by the dishonesty of its presentation....

Have any of these conditions been met? Such sovereignty as Iraq has is gravely marred by the continuous efforts of Iran to direct the course of its internal politics through armed means and otherwise. Iraq is not stable. The Iraqi government has still not been completely formed, and the parties contesting the parliamentary election of early 2010 have not yet come to an agreement on how the state will be run or who will run it. Iraq is not self-reliant. In fact, it will not be able to protect its territory or its airspace. Its government is not “just, representative, and accountable,” but rather heading toward a new authoritarian structure at a time when many Arab states are convulsed by resistance to authoritarianism. The U.S. has not helped Iraq build ties of trade or commerce. Above all, today’s announcement is the definitive renunciation of any attempt to “forge a partnership with the people and government of Iraq.” In other words, the president has failed to achieve any of the objectives that he established as his own policy in February 2009—apart, of course, from withdrawing U.S. military forces.

This failure was not inevitable. When President Obama took office, the U.S. had more than 100,000 troops in Iraq who had just completed, together with the Iraqi Security Forces, driving off Iranian militias and clearing the last bastions of al Qaeda in Iraq and Sunni resistance forces. As he noted in that February 2009 speech, Iraq had just completed provincial elections that were, in fact, “just, representative, and accountable,” and that laid a solid foundation for the transition to a successful Iraqi parliamentary democracy. And, in fact, the parliamentary elections of early 2010 were also in many respects remarkably successful—they were peaceful, heavily-contested, with high participation, and produced the potential for a new political balance in which forces of secularism and cross-sectarianism might well have succeeded. Had the U.S. pursued a determined strategy, using all of the considerable leverage at our disposal, to support the formation of an Iraqi government harnessing that potential, then Iraq’s path could have been very different.

But the Obama administration did not focus on helping Iraq move forward to seize this opportunity, but rather focused on prodding the Iraqis to form a coalition government as rapidly as possible—in order to negotiate a new agreement that would allow American forces to remain in Iraq after the end of this year. In other words, the administration threw away the chance of political progress in Iraq in pursuit of something it has now decided it never wanted to begin with.

Observers of U.S. policy could have been excused for finding all of this rather confusing, but today’s speech resolves any lack of clarity. The president has enunciated the Obama Doctrine: American retreat.

If there's any multilateralism buried in the manure, it is that of widespread burying heads in it to avoid facing the reality of a contra-Western interests Middle East that we will see in Iraq and Libya, as we've seen in Egypt, while Iran and its proxies are encouraged as was al-Quaeda by prior US weaknesses and excuses.

BTW: Obama Ignores That U.S. Won in Iraq -- Twice