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George W. Bush: US troop pullout from Iraq 'frustrated me'

Bush signed the Iraq withdrawal document in 2008. The document stipulated that ALL American forces would be withdrawn from Iraq by December 2011. Negotiations between the US and Iraq for a new SOFA agreement began in 2010. Obama proposed leaving 10,000 US troops in Iraq as advisers. In October of 2011, as the Arab Spring was sweeping across the ME, the Iraqi government stated that it would not accept any SOFA that infringed on its sovereignty or granted immunity to US troops stationed on Iraqi soil. The US completed the final [Bush] pullout and maintained an embassy and two consulates in Iraq. About 5,000 US private military contractors remained.
 
vanceen said:
Yes, invading Iraq was a terrible blunder.

And yes, de-Baathification and dissolution of the Iraqi miltary was a bad mistake.

And yes, allowing the Shia government of Iraq to exclude Sunnis from power was a bad mistake.

And yes, Bush signed the agreement on the timing of troop withdrawal.

But to pretend that Obama's hands were tied because of that agreement is either naive or disingenuous. The US had (and has), a "certain influence" over Iraqi affairs. If Obama had seen the importance of not leaving a vacuum in Iraq (which he should have) and if he had exerted some pull with the Iraqi government (which he could have), we could have kept prosecution immunity and managed a transition that would have prevented ISIS' rise.

People are always pointing out who the US has overthrown governments and dominated countries, sometimes without any use of the US military. Suddenly, if Iraq says we've got to go, we've just got no options but to go. Please!
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You were doing so well until you made the claim that President Obama could have "exerted some pull" to re-negotiate the SOFA. He did try. The only claim you can make is he "should have tried harder". You also have to pretend that somehow 10-20 thousand troops would have prevented ISIS. We know for a fact that no amount of troops would have prevented ISIS once Bush's stooge "excluded Sunnis from power" (see post 41 and 46).

And your "hey lets just overthrow the govt" comment is funny. Who would we put back in power? the sunnis? yea, that just proves how completely f****d up Bush's invasion was. so just to be clear, President Obama is not responsible for Bush's stooge not renegotiating the SOFA or Bush's stooge"excluding Sunnis from power."
 
Vern said:
You were doing so well until you made the claim that President Obama could have "exerted some pull" to re-negotiate the SOFA. He did try. The only claim you can make is he "should have tried harder". You also have to pretend that somehow 10-20 thousand troops would have prevented ISIS. We know for a fact that no amount of troops would have prevented ISIS once Bush's stooge "excluded Sunnis from power" (see post 41 and 46).

And your "hey lets just overthrow the govt" comment is funny. Who would we put back in power? the sunnis? yea, that just proves how completely f****d up Bush's invasion was. so just to be clear, President Obama is not responsible for Bush's stooge not renegotiating the SOFA or Bush's stooge"excluding Sunnis from power."
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We'll agree to disagree.

Yes, Obama should have tried harder to keep troops in Iraq. It was a mistake not to, and I think it was something he could have done.

You may have misunderstood my point about overthrowing governments. I'm pointing out the inconsistency between the oft-expressed view that the US (on the one hand) more or less single-handedly changed the governments in Iran and Chile without any military action and, on the other hand, had no cards to play when it came to dealing with the Iraqi government. I think it's naive to suppose that the US didn't have very strong bargaining power with Iraq in 2010-2011. My interpretation of Obama's actions is that he gave priority to his political promises to pull out the troops, which is in itself an honorable thing. But I believe subsequent history shows it was a mistake.
 
vanceen said:
We'll agree to disagree.

Yes, Obama should have tried harder to keep troops in Iraq. It was a mistake not to, and I think it was something he could have done.

You may have misunderstood my point about overthrowing governments. I'm pointing out the inconsistency between the oft-expressed view that the US (on the one hand) more or less single-handedly changed the governments in Iran and Chile without any military action and, on the other hand, had no cards to play when it came to dealing with the Iraqi government. I think it's naive to suppose that the US didn't have very strong bargaining power with Iraq in 2010-2011. My interpretation of Obama's actions is that he gave priority to his political promises to pull out the troops, which is in itself an honorable thing. But I believe subsequent history shows it was a mistake.
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Hindsight is always 20/20. No one could have predicted that the 30,000 Iraqi troops - trained and heavily armed by the US - stationed outside of Mosul would surrender the city and flee en mass when confronted by a few hundred lightly armed ISIS fighters. No one could have predicted that Iraqi government would ultimately have to threaten the military with field executions for cowardice to convince them to fight for their own county.
 
Actually, given the political and sectarian situation in Iraq, it wasn't terribly hard to predict.

But no matter. If hindsight is 20/20, then hindsight is usually correct. Not everything is easy to foresee, but not foreseeing them is still a mistake.
 
vanceen said:
Actually, given the political and sectarian situation in Iraq, it wasn't terribly hard to predict.

But no matter. If hindsight is 20/20, then hindsight is usually correct. Not everything is easy to foresee, but not foreseeing them is still a mistake.
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The Iraq War was a foreseeable and publicly predicted mistake.
 
vanceen said:
We'll agree to disagree.

Yes, Obama should have tried harder to keep troops in Iraq. It was a mistake not to, and I think it was something he could have done.

You may have misunderstood my point about overthrowing governments. I'm pointing out the inconsistency between the oft-expressed view that the US (on the one hand) more or less single-handedly changed the governments in Iran and Chile without any military action and, on the other hand, had no cards to play when it came to dealing with the Iraqi government. I think it's naive to suppose that the US didn't have very strong bargaining power with Iraq in 2010-2011. My interpretation of Obama's actions is that he gave priority to his political promises to pull out the troops, which is in itself an honorable thing. But I believe subsequent history shows it was a mistake.
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Sorry, I don't accept your "inconsistency" narrative. And just so you know, I would consider the Chile military assuming control of the govt, rounding up 10s of thousands of people and killing them "military action". And maybe our history in Iran and Iraq only reduced our "bargaining power" with the Shia govt. Besides making excuses for Saddam gassing 100,000 kurds (we blamed Iran) and calling for an uprising after the first gulf war and doing nothing as Saddam slaughtered those who rose up (dictators tend to try to discourage future uprisings) we also invaded Iraq based on lies. When up to 500,000 Iraqis die and more are displaced because you did a crappy job of stabilizing the country, maybe just maybe you don't have any bargaining power.

And you also have to ignore that we had 130,000 troops in Iraq (see post 46) before the surge and the surge only worked because we put the sunnis on the payroll. If 130,000 couldn't subdue them when they were excluded from power, what would 10,000 troops do after Bush's stooge excluded them from power?
 
Man I want to get into this.... so much crap flying all over the place....


1) Bush is pissed of the pull out, He knows he kinda F-ed Up....so he knew that he has to stick around to control the mess
2) WMD or not, We got hit and we needed to show force and show that we would not just take it laying down....right or wrong going to Iraq was good and bad period.
3) No clear objective was ever placed... WMD, Out a dictator, establish democracy... whatever... the objective kept changing and evolving, That is just bad for business. If we were to look for WMD, we should have nothing, get out, If we wanted to out a dictator, when we did get out. Force Democracy on a religious culture that fought for 2000 years... is just a pipe dream..... The hell is wrong with us thinking we can establish a 300 year old wanna be system (the US system) That we barely have control of anymore, on to 3 warring religions.....
4) Dubya, Bama, Trump...... its a losing battle for all of them..... at this point..... we need to stop worrying about other people and start protecting ourselves. We have pissed off enough people and we cannot even control our own house, Its like "MTV's real world" in the US, no one can get along, how the hell we supposed to be a model country for others?


freaking crazy...... Christianity, Democracy on countries, that have been living a certain way for 2000 years....... 60 years ago, Racism was peaking, and we still cant get rid of it.... how do we expect a culture saturated for 2000 years to change on 10 years....
 
American said:
The UN is run by incompetent boobs, similar to the likes of John Kerry.
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Can you even imagine how big of a clusterufck Iraq would be today if we'd let the likes of the UN get involved?
 
American said:
Horse****, don't even try to blame Bush again. Just GFTO of here with that ****. Obama owns this and did it on his own. It was his personal campaign promise.
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Sorry but Bush signed the agreement to withdraw all troops by 2011. He wanted more but the Iraqi's wouldn't budge and they still wouldn't budge for Obama either. Bush owns the Iraq mess and he knows it. Thankfully Obama wouldn't budge on our troops defending them from ISIS and the Iraqi army is finally a force to be reckoned with. If we can just keep our noses out of Iraq they might even become a country again.
 
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joG said:
It is true that Obama did not do very well. As a matter of fact, what meets the eye was pretty bad. But Iraq is not really an American problem and we should have turned it over to the UN.
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Iraq became an American problem when Bush made it one. It was, if you think back, something the neocons thought would be easy. The Fox News crowd was congratulating its genius 6 weeks in. In 2006 we were losing 100+ per month. It was a dumb social engineering experiment. When did conservatives start endorsing massive, trillion(s) $ social engineering experiments? Answer : when they were no longer conservative about much.
 
apdst said:
Things were stabilizing, before Obama cut-n-run.
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LOL Bush's butcher in chief Maliki was running death squads against the Sunni's but you call that stabilizing. Bush left no hope of a stable Iraq. His bungling of the occupation was legendary.
 
American said:
George W. Bush: US troop pullout from Iraq 'frustrated me' | Fox News



TRANSLATION: Obama was a jackass for pulling the troops out. Okay, so we need to continue to go back in there and kill them all.
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Too late now.

It's a touchy situation. President Bush originally signed the SOFA for the timeline of the withdraw, and politics as normal had the democrats crediting president Obama for it. Maybe if president Obama wasn't so eager to look like the hero, getting us out of there, Iraq would be a better nation today. I will contend that if he should have negotiated with the leaders of the time, for us to stay longer.
 
joG said:
It is true that Obama did not do very well. As a matter of fact, what meets the eye was pretty bad. But Iraq is not really an American problem and we should have turned it over to the UN.
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American said:
The UN is run by incompetent boobs, similar to the likes of John Kerry.
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Yep.

It would have been even worse than now.
 
Lord of Planar said:
Too late now.

It's a touchy situation. President Bush originally signed the SOFA for the timeline of the withdraw, and politics as normal had the democrats crediting president Obama for it. Maybe if president Obama wasn't so eager to look like the hero, getting us out of there, Iraq would be a better nation today. I will contend that if he should have negotiated with the leaders of the time, for us to stay longer.
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Agreed.... we over stayed our time, from the get go, if we were to get out we should have gotten out WAY earlier. Since we chose to stay longer, we had the responsibility to see it through not half @$$ it like we did.....

While on a Task Force, it was UUUGGGLLYLLLLYY watching the IF, doing raids and trying to take care of themselves...... More so..... when half didnt show up.... there was no accountability...and for us to expect nothing less is just being being unrealistic.....
 
Higgins86 said:
The thousands of dead US soldiers and the lack of WMDs should frustrate him more
.*Iraq vet before everyone slaughters me
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It wasn't just about WMD. That was only one of several reasons we went in. I find it so damn funny that WMD is the only thing the left speaks of. Is that because you guys solidly lose on the other reasons?
 
PeteEU said:
LOL where on earth did he say that? HE was the one who agreed to pull out the troops. All Obama did was carry out a pre-existing deal with the Iraqis.

If he is so worried about ISIS, then he should not have invaded in the first place!
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LOL...

Your side was all over giving president Obama the credit back then. Now that it went sour, blame president Bush?

LOL...

Typical...

LOL...
 
American said:
We quit early, and Bush predicted precisely what would happen.

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Yep.

President Bush is a whole lot smarter than people give him credit for.

Are liberals bigoted of the Texas accent?
 
americanwoman said:
I think Bush does hold some of the blame for starting the war in the first place. We totally ****ed up in Iraq, 2 trillion dollar mistake in fact and counting. The mess was made by Bush and Obama didn't clean it up properly, so they are both to blame.
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What you say is true. However, at the time, the best evidence called for us going in.

Hindsight is 20/20.
 
iguanaman said:
Sorry but Bush signed the agreement to withdraw all troops by 2011. He wanted more but the Iraqi's wouldn't budge and they still wouldn't budge for Obama either. Bush owns the Iraq mess and he knows it. Thankfully Obama wouldn't budge on our troops defending them from ISIS and the Iraqi army is finally a force to be reckoned with. If we can just keep our noses out of Iraq they might even become a country again.
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I agree with some, but Obama didn't try very hard; it was about campaign promises, not foreign policy.
 
American said:
I agree with some, but Obama didn't try very hard; it was about campaign promises, not foreign policy.
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Obama tried very hard.

The GOP is on record as saying they would not try at all .
 
CriticalThought said:
If something doesn't work once...try, try again?

No problem. Thanks to Trump, Yemen will now be the newest hotspot for terrorists.
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You don't really even deserve a response for the tripe.
 
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