consortiumnews.com
American troops have left Iraq…..
Perhaps the only left in country are the Marines at the Embassy’s, the CIA and a couple of ex- Special Ops Contractor groups here and there….
But the American combat footprint that was wanted there is gone….
The piece below gives a review of how the American Government dropped the political ball in their goal to leave the country with 10,000 to 14, 000 troops and more stability…..Only to watch infighting among themselves and the Iraq’s led to Iran getting what IT wanted in the wobbly political country left after the war….
The President may have played off the withdrawal of the troops as a Good domestic political promise….
That was just a face saving PR line….
In the case of Iraq, the American goal has been to leave a stable and representative government, avoid a power vacuum that neighboring states and terrorists could exploit and maintain sufficient influence so that Iraq would be a partner or, at a minimum, not an opponent in the Middle East.
But the Obama administration has fallen frustratingly short of some of those objectives.
The attempt by Mr. Obama and his senior aides to fashion an extraordinary power-sharing arrangement between Mr. Maliki and Mr. Allawi never materialized. Neither did an agreement that would have kept a small American force in Iraq to train the Iraqi military and patrol the country’s skies. A plan to use American civilians to train the Iraqi police has been severely cut back. The result is an Iraq that is less stable domestically and less reliable internationally than the United States had envisioned.
The story of these efforts has received little attention in a nation weary of the conflict in Iraq, and administration officials have rarely talked about them. This account is based on interviews with many of the principals, in Washington and Baghdad.
White House officials portray their exit strategy as a success, asserting that the number of civilian fatalities in Iraq is low compared with 2006, when the war was at its height. Politics, not violence, has become the principal means for Iraqis to resolve their differences, they say. “Recent news coverage of Iraq would suggest that as our troops departed, American influence went with them and our administration shifted its focus away from Iraq,” Antony Blinken, the national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said in a speech in March. “The fact is, our engagements have increased.”
To many Iraqis, the United States’ influence is greatly diminished. “American policy is very weak,” observed Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff to Massoud Barzani, the president of the semiautonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. “It is not clear to us how they have defined their interests in Iraq,” Mr. Hussein said. “They are picking events and reacting on the basis of events. That is the policy.”
Note….
This article is adapted from “The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama,” by Michael R. Gordon and retired Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, to be published by Pantheon Books, an imprint of Random House, on Tuesday.
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