May 25th
Dr. Charles Krauthammer has a recent revisionist column
claiming that Obama lost the “victory” in Iraq by withdrawing our troops in
2011. Here is a quote from his column:
“[Victory,] which
Obama proceeded to fully squander. With the 2012 election approaching, he chose
to liquidate our military presence in Iraq.…We surrendered our most valuable
strategic assets, such as control of Iraqi airspace, soon to become the
indispensable conduit for Iran to supply and sustain the Assad regime in Syria.”
Krauthammer’s
utterances here are absurd on their face: “Liquidating our military presence in
Iraq” (his term) was arranged by George Bush in a Status of Forces Agreement with
the Iraqi government in 2008. Bush agreed to withdraw all US forces by December
31, 2011. This agreement was made before President Obama took office and he
honored what his predecessor had agreed to. Well, shame on him, right
Krauthammer?
We might have
left a small force in Iraq if the Iraqi government had allowed our troops’
offenses be tried in our military courts. They refused that request so Obama
removed all troops as previously agreed. This is how Obama lost the Iraq war
that Bush had won.
Then we have
the next page from the Krauthammer imagination, that we have lost control of
Iraqi air space. What Krauthammer has done here is to conflate our abandonment
of Iraqi airfields with abandonment of their air space. Dr. Krauthammer should
stick to psychiatry; well maybe not, he’ll probably cause less damage writing
right wing columns than he would if he were treating vulnerable people.
There have been
literally thousands of sorties flown against various targets in Iraq since we
supposedly “lost control of airspace.” Everyone
has seen the helicopter supply drop of food and the rescue of Yazidis in the
Sinjar Mountains near the Kurdish section of Iraq. Isn’t it amazing that United
States forces could do that without control of the airspace?
I appreciate
the terrible trauma that Krauthammer has endured but perhaps he should, as a
psychiatrist, have found enough self-knowledge to sublimate his aggression and
redirect it to a more worthy target than President Obama.
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