This is long, you have been warned. Take a pee break and get a cup of cocoa. You're going to need a minute.
I hear every so often the lie that our generals wanted the US to stay in Iraq and if we had, there would be no ISIS. That our leaving was solely a political decision based upon President Obama's campaign promises and against the advice he received from his military commanders and diplomatic personnel.
I hear every so often the lie that our generals wanted the US to stay in Iraq and if we had, there would be no ISIS. That our leaving was solely a political decision based upon President Obama's campaign promises and against the advice he received from his military commanders and diplomatic personnel.
This is false. It's always false, no matter how many times it is repeated. I know, because A) I pay attention and B) I was physically there, on the ground during the time period of the withdrawal.
We left, because:
1) We had an agreement to withdraw our troops, to leave by a certain date, signed off on by President George Bush in 2008. Here's a picture of him with Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki signing that Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).
2) We couldn't get that agreement modified in a way that was acceptable to us. The next President and the Department of State worked very hard on this but were unable to come to reasonable terms with the then Iraqi gov't.
3) Iraq did have a democratically elected gov't and some stability. There was a path forward that didn't require US troops in large numbers.
That, is why we left. "B)" is the real reason, though "A)" and "C)" gave us the legitimacy to do so and also allowed us to say we were keeping our word. Again, I was physically there in Baghdad, Erbil and Basra during the time period of the withdrawal.
Story time!
The then PM, Nouri Al-Maliki wanted ridiculous payoffs for the US gov't to *rent* bases we had either built or rebuilt. And I do mean ridiculous. It would've been cheaper to build and put the US Army up in a bunch of Sheratons, Marriotts, or Hiltons with full room service (but probably no mini-bar.
).
Al-Maliki basically wanted the US to pay for all the infrastructure rebuild Iraq needs/wants (much of it not due to war damage of any kind) allowing him to then use most of the oil revenues as he saw fit (primarily to reward various tribes that were in his voting bloc and screw the rest of the country). He wanted us to use the US taxpayer credit card to supplement his income from oil (around 80 Billion).
He also wanted to alter the SOFA to allow US troops to be arrested and prosecuted by Iraqi authorities, effectively making them hostages of the Iraqi gov't. Anytime they wanted more money or for some sort of Public Relations (PR) reason they'd round up a few, beat the bejesus out of them (if not worse) and make us pay a "fine" or "reparation" to get them back. Effectively, allow US soldiers to be kidnapped for profit by local Iraqi officials.
That's the kind of deal the Prime Minister of Iraq (and therefore the Iraqi gov't) was offering us.
The *entire* military leadership of the US went to the President and said this was an insane idea. And the President, Barack Obama, agreed. So we kept to the original agreement, and left.
Consider: We weren't going to depose a democratically elected leader of Iraq for obvious reasons, we could not work with Al-Maliki and his SOFA re-write AND we weren't about to be extorted. So we did what we wanted to do anyways. We packed up and left. Smoked tires to get out of there. Vamoosed. Skedaddled. Hit the road and didn't look back once.
The funny part about it (to those of us there at the very end) is that the Iraqis were amazed at how fast we left. As the outlying bases started rolling up in the hinterlands and we fell back to a few major bases (Balad and Victory among them) the Iraqis got all pop-eyed. "OMG they are serious! They are leaving! Someone stop them!". The Iraqi army commands started screaming at the PM's office and they started trying to re-negotiate with us. Not understanding that time had simply run out. We were no longer negotiating the SOFA or anything else.
We were leaving.
Some of the smaller bases we left in the middle of the night. The Iraqis showed up the next day to a gate with a lock on it and no one there. And they were all "WTH where IS everybody!" as a tumbleweed rolls by on the inside of the gate. (Poetic license but you get the drift). It was like that. They were genuinely stunned; the idea of us actually leaving was something that was pooh-pooh'd all the way from the PM's office on down.
Until we were burning rubber out of the driveway.
They believed (because this IS how you do things in the mid-east) there would be 15 years of negotiations with nothing ever really being resolved and every now and then some local police chief would kidnap a few US soldiers for a Eid Al-Fitr (think XMAS) bonus "fine" for some crime they just made up on the spot. They believed, that like everyone else before us, we'd start to steal our share of the oil revenues. Primarily through graft, ie: by having Iraqis hand out 5K Rolex watches to every DoS employee or soldier at or over the rank of Captain. Everyone would be kewl with that arrangement. That's how they expected to deal with the US Government.
So the US actually keeping our agreed upon word to the letter of the law made their heads explode. "Myfriend Myfriend this is not how we do things!"
So. We're leaving. We left very quickly to make the SOFA/withdrawal date AND because we wanted as many troops home for XMAS as possible AND because we simply could not work with the then gov't. It'd be like trying to work with the Al Capone mafia. Seriously. That bad.
So that's how and why we got out, from someone on the ground at the time directly observing the process.
I can tell you I actually cheered when Al-Maliki was finally driven out in 2013. Getting rid of him isn't going to make solving Iraq's problems easy, but under Al-Maliki it was flat impossible to do so. Eventually the Iraqis realized that, once they realized we wouldn't lift a finger to stop ISIS until he was gone. Dealing with him was so difficult we were prepared to evacuate/abandon the largest US Embassy in the world rather than do so. Again, that bad. Once the Iraqi gov't understood *that* and had learned the hard way that we do actually keep our word from time to time, they got that Al-Maliki needed to go.
Because in truth, it was many of his policies of deliberate sectarian divisiveness, suppression, and impoverization of the minority Sunnis that led to the rise of ISIS in Iraq.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
PS: I warned you it would be long.
1) We had an agreement to withdraw our troops, to leave by a certain date, signed off on by President George Bush in 2008. Here's a picture of him with Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki signing that Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).
2) We couldn't get that agreement modified in a way that was acceptable to us. The next President and the Department of State worked very hard on this but were unable to come to reasonable terms with the then Iraqi gov't.
3) Iraq did have a democratically elected gov't and some stability. There was a path forward that didn't require US troops in large numbers.
That, is why we left. "B)" is the real reason, though "A)" and "C)" gave us the legitimacy to do so and also allowed us to say we were keeping our word. Again, I was physically there in Baghdad, Erbil and Basra during the time period of the withdrawal.
Story time!
The then PM, Nouri Al-Maliki wanted ridiculous payoffs for the US gov't to *rent* bases we had either built or rebuilt. And I do mean ridiculous. It would've been cheaper to build and put the US Army up in a bunch of Sheratons, Marriotts, or Hiltons with full room service (but probably no mini-bar.
).Al-Maliki basically wanted the US to pay for all the infrastructure rebuild Iraq needs/wants (much of it not due to war damage of any kind) allowing him to then use most of the oil revenues as he saw fit (primarily to reward various tribes that were in his voting bloc and screw the rest of the country). He wanted us to use the US taxpayer credit card to supplement his income from oil (around 80 Billion).
He also wanted to alter the SOFA to allow US troops to be arrested and prosecuted by Iraqi authorities, effectively making them hostages of the Iraqi gov't. Anytime they wanted more money or for some sort of Public Relations (PR) reason they'd round up a few, beat the bejesus out of them (if not worse) and make us pay a "fine" or "reparation" to get them back. Effectively, allow US soldiers to be kidnapped for profit by local Iraqi officials.
That's the kind of deal the Prime Minister of Iraq (and therefore the Iraqi gov't) was offering us.
The *entire* military leadership of the US went to the President and said this was an insane idea. And the President, Barack Obama, agreed. So we kept to the original agreement, and left.
Consider: We weren't going to depose a democratically elected leader of Iraq for obvious reasons, we could not work with Al-Maliki and his SOFA re-write AND we weren't about to be extorted. So we did what we wanted to do anyways. We packed up and left. Smoked tires to get out of there. Vamoosed. Skedaddled. Hit the road and didn't look back once.
The funny part about it (to those of us there at the very end) is that the Iraqis were amazed at how fast we left. As the outlying bases started rolling up in the hinterlands and we fell back to a few major bases (Balad and Victory among them) the Iraqis got all pop-eyed. "OMG they are serious! They are leaving! Someone stop them!". The Iraqi army commands started screaming at the PM's office and they started trying to re-negotiate with us. Not understanding that time had simply run out. We were no longer negotiating the SOFA or anything else.
We were leaving.
Some of the smaller bases we left in the middle of the night. The Iraqis showed up the next day to a gate with a lock on it and no one there. And they were all "WTH where IS everybody!" as a tumbleweed rolls by on the inside of the gate. (Poetic license but you get the drift). It was like that. They were genuinely stunned; the idea of us actually leaving was something that was pooh-pooh'd all the way from the PM's office on down.
Until we were burning rubber out of the driveway.
They believed (because this IS how you do things in the mid-east) there would be 15 years of negotiations with nothing ever really being resolved and every now and then some local police chief would kidnap a few US soldiers for a Eid Al-Fitr (think XMAS) bonus "fine" for some crime they just made up on the spot. They believed, that like everyone else before us, we'd start to steal our share of the oil revenues. Primarily through graft, ie: by having Iraqis hand out 5K Rolex watches to every DoS employee or soldier at or over the rank of Captain. Everyone would be kewl with that arrangement. That's how they expected to deal with the US Government.
So the US actually keeping our agreed upon word to the letter of the law made their heads explode. "Myfriend Myfriend this is not how we do things!"
So. We're leaving. We left very quickly to make the SOFA/withdrawal date AND because we wanted as many troops home for XMAS as possible AND because we simply could not work with the then gov't. It'd be like trying to work with the Al Capone mafia. Seriously. That bad.
So that's how and why we got out, from someone on the ground at the time directly observing the process.
I can tell you I actually cheered when Al-Maliki was finally driven out in 2013. Getting rid of him isn't going to make solving Iraq's problems easy, but under Al-Maliki it was flat impossible to do so. Eventually the Iraqis realized that, once they realized we wouldn't lift a finger to stop ISIS until he was gone. Dealing with him was so difficult we were prepared to evacuate/abandon the largest US Embassy in the world rather than do so. Again, that bad. Once the Iraqi gov't understood *that* and had learned the hard way that we do actually keep our word from time to time, they got that Al-Maliki needed to go.
Because in truth, it was many of his policies of deliberate sectarian divisiveness, suppression, and impoverization of the minority Sunnis that led to the rise of ISIS in Iraq.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
PS: I warned you it would be long.
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