{"id":50862,"date":"2014-06-13T10:33:35","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T14:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=50862"},"modified":"2014-06-13T10:39:59","modified_gmt":"2014-06-13T14:39:59","slug":"washington-post-blames-us-troops-and-bush-for-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=50862","title":{"rendered":"Washington Post blames US Troops and Bush for Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pat and Chief Tango send us links to the Washington Post in which they do their best to deflect blame from the current administration for the failures of the Iraqi Army in Iraq this past week. Greg Jaffe, the WaPo journalist <\/a>who told us at the last Milblog Conference that we have outlived our usefulness in the information business because he knows as much about the military now as we know, begins the blame game by blaming US troops for losing Iraq;<\/p>\n

The Iraqi army\u2019s collapse this week marked a stark failure for the U.S. military that trained it and for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki\u2019s government, which has struggled to address leadership and morale problems that now threaten the force\u2019s ability to defend the country.<\/p>\n

Although they far outnumbered the insurgents and had greater firepower, Maliki\u2019s troops have fled by the thousands in the country’s north, allowing the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to take the city of Mosul and start an ominous march toward Baghdad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, nice try, Jaffe. The troops did their jobs. They went above and beyond what they could do given what they had to work with. Fareed Zakaria, in another Post article<\/a>, takes the more popular position of blaming Bush;<\/p>\n

But how did Maliki come to be prime minister of Iraq? He was the product of a series of momentous decisions made by the Bush administration. Having invaded Iraq with a small force \u2014 what the expert Tom Ricks called \u201cthe worst war plan in American history\u201d \u2014 the administration needed to find local allies. It quickly decided to destroy Iraq\u2019s Sunni ruling establishment and empower the hard-line Shiite religious parties that had opposed Saddam Hussein. This meant that a structure of Sunni power that had been in the area for centuries collapsed. These moves \u2014 to disband the army, dismantle the bureaucracy and purge Sunnis in general \u2014 might have been more consequential than the invasion itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Um, Maliki has won popular elections in Iraq at least three times, the most recent was last month<\/a>. That’s how he came to be Prime Minister. Leaning on Tom Ricks isn’t helping you. Ricks is taking the Obama position on Iraq, he’s decided that he’s ignoring it.<\/p>\n

The problem in Iraq isn’t a failure of the troops to do their job or Bush’s planning for the war. The failures came before the war began when liberals decided that a war against Iraq by a Republican Administration was unacceptable. It was fine during the Clinton Administration, but in 2003, not so much. <\/p>\n

That told the insurgents that all they needed to do was wait us out and we’d leave. Saddam Hussein gave his generals each copies of the “Black Hawk Down” DVD as an instructional manual to defeat American will.<\/p>\n

The insurgents in Iraq thought that the 2006 midterm election was a great victory, misunderstanding the US’ political process and the Iraq Surge surprised them. The 2008 election was their real victory – the Obama Administration wanted the US out of Iraq before the 2012 elections, regardless of the cost. Well, those chickens came home to roost this week.<\/p>\n

The Weekly Standard<\/a> reminds us that Joe Biden once called Iraq one of President Obama’s “great achievements”. Withdrawal was their only strategy, much like it is in Afghanistan now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pat and Chief Tango send us links to the Washington Post in which they do their … Washington Post blames US Troops and Bush for Iraq<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}