5 years ago it wasn't stable. Balancing a pin on its point does not mean it's stable. It is in fact unstable. It held for as long as we would be there as a force, but we cannot be there for infinity. This is one of the main failures of the original invasion, we invaded a place that could not stand on its own. It stood so long as there was sufficient force, be that Saddam or some occupying force.
If you're going to topple governments, you need to be able to plan for success afterwards. We did not. So 14 years and we've only gone backwards.
Are you denying the claims your president made in his December 14, 2011 speech at Fort Bragg--almost three years into his presidency? He said we were "leaving behind a
sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq." He spoke of "this moment of success" that American troops had brought about it Iraq and called it
"an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making."
What had become of that "sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq," just three years later? Where has it gone? Either Mr. Obama was lying, or he has quickly squandered that extraordinary achievement he boasted of. He, General Dempsey, and others in his administration are now openly admitting they were caught by surprise--that they had no plan to counter what has happened. For more than a year, Mr. Obama watched as this malignancy grew in Syria. But he did nothing, dismissing ISIS as a "JV team." He finally began a token military effort last summer, but it has been so puny that the jihadists have
gained ground against it. Within the past few weeks Ramadi, a city of a half-million or more people only sixty miles from Baghdad, has fallen to them.
But occupying forces are always at a disadvantage, it's a race against the clock.
Really? What evidence is there for that? The U.S. still maintains a substantial force in South Korea, more than sixty years after the end of the war there. I don't see that it is at any disadvantage to anyone or ever has been, or that there has been any race against the clock. It was and is a strong military force, and the U.S. will maintain it there as long as it sees fit.
Military experts argued for a somewhat smaller force of that kind to be left in Iraq,
but Mr. Obama didn't want one. So he used an existing status-of-forces agreement as a flimsy excuse for throwing up his hands helplessly and doing nothing. Imagine Franklin Roosevelt, or Harry Truman, or Dwight Eisenhower, or John Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan meekly letting the U.S.-approved leader of a piss-ant country the U.S. had overrun with hundreds of thousands of troops deny him,
if he had been determined to keep a small part of that force there.