2016 May 29^th

A year ago, approximately, Dr. Charles Krauthammer, a favorite of the Fox News folks, penned a column on President Obama’s supposed loss of the Iraq War. Krauthammer is not an idiot but his political blinders lead him to overlook some important facts. At least this is a break from the current election cycle nausea. Herewith is his column:

2015 May 25^th

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 to 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.