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Originally Posted by Jim in CT
Fact - at the height of the Surge, Al Queda in Iraq was decimated. We have th ecommunications intercepts from their leaders, saying it was lost.
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But it wasn't destroyed. al Qaeda in Iraq was suffering largely because we were PAYING Sunni militants to push back against it. That's not a long term strategy...
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Fact - when Obama announced that he wasn't going to seek a SOF agreement, but was going to pull everyone out, many military experts advised him that bad things would happen in th evaccuum our departure would create. Ask the Cambodians if it's a coincidence that Pol Pot waited until we withdreew from Vietnam to start his genocide.
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As we've discussed a million times (perhaps you need a million +1) there already was a SOF agreement in place per the Bush administration. The new Iraqi government wanted us out, and the Bush policy of de-Bathification is a key reason we didn't have reasonable options.
I'm not sure what Cambodia has to do with this. Are you suggesting we should have left a small residual force?
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Fact - after we withdrew, ISIS filled that void.
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Not really. The first void that ISIS was able to take advantage of was more a by-product of the Syrian civil war. The second void was created by the Iraqi government using Shiite troops to guard Sunnis in Mosul.
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Fact - Obama (who is always wrong, yet somehow never in doubt), called them "the junior varsity".
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He did, and at that time they were the JV. I don't think he wanted to give them any more cred than necessary.
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Fact - hours before the Paris attack, Obama said that ISIS was contained, and that among our successes, has been increased security at international airports. Incredibky, he said that, while the fuselage of the downed Russian plane was probably still smoldering. Did no one on his staff tell him that happened?
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The context for that remark clearly was that ISIS was not capturing new territory and in fact appears to be losing some critical ground. I think the timing of recent terror events are a result of this pressure.
ISIS knows they can't win if the key powers unite to destroy them. They need to stir up a global backlash against Islam. Listening to most of the GOP candidates it sounds like we're starting down that path.