Haven't Christians in Syria and Iraq been threatened and attacked over the past several months by these same ISIS forces? Just saying...NYTimes: President Obama said on Saturday that the airstrikes and humanitarian assistance drops he ordered last week in Iraq could go on for months, preparing Americans for an extended military presence in the skies there as Iraq’s leaders try to build a new government.
“I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem in weeks,” Mr. Obama told reporters before leaving for a two-week golf-and-beach vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. “This is going to be a long-term project.”
The president repeated his insistence that his administration would not send ground troops back to Iraq after ending an unpopular, decade-long war and withdrawing the last troops in 2011. But two days after emphasizing the limited scope of the mission in a White House address, he pledged that the United States would stand with Iraq if it could form a unified and inclusive government to counter the Sunni militants who threaten its future.
“Changing that environment so that the millions of Sunnis who live in these areas feel connected to and well served by a national government, that’s a long-term process,” he said during a lengthy departure statement on the White House lawn during which he took several questions from reporters.
The American military continued striking militants in Iraq on Saturday, with jet fighters and drones conducting four attacks that military officers said were designed to defend Yazidis, an ethnic and religious minority.
But just for gits and shiggles, let's FLASHBACK...
CNSNews: On multiple occasions in the run-up to the 2012 election, President Obama gave himself credit for ending the war in Iraq. Here on video are some of those back-patting moments.Really? We're leaving behind a solid, stable, self-reliant Iraq? Not so much...
But no, delete all that from your memory, clear your cache, especially the drones out there. Because now Barack Obama says 'not my decision' to pull troops out of Iraq! Unreal...
Related link: Obama: Pulling All U.S. Troops Out of Iraq Was Not 'My Decision'NRO: President Obama refused to take responsibility for the lack of U.S. troops in Iraq, saying that American soldiers had to pull out due to political pressure from Iraqi leaders.
“This issue keeps on coming up as if this was my decision,” Obama retorted when asked if he had any second thoughts, in light of the terrorist force taking over regions of Iraq, about having pulled all American troops out of the country. “The reason that we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq was because a majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there and politically they could not pass the kind of laws that would be required to protect our troops in Iraq,” he said.
A report in The New Yorker showed how President Obama failed to secure the status of forces agreement necessary to leave the troops in place after 2011.
That's what a handshake's worth with this joker. And the lib media aren't too happy about it. But the fact is Obama didn't end the war in Iraq...he restarted it.
Rick Moran adds:NRO: President Barack Obama came to office promising to “bring a responsible end to the war in Iraq.” That should have been easy enough to do, considering the war was already over. Alas, he seems to have had in mind something quite different than “ending a war.” Perhaps because of his general bias against exertions of American power, Obama seems to have convinced himself that our continuing military presence in post-war Iraq was the same as continuing the war.
This novel conception of when wars end suggests Obama may yet pull our forces out of Europe and the Far East in order to “end” World War II. It also helps to explain how he came to equate “responsibly ending the war in Iraq” with throwing away everything we had gained from it. Obama made it plain from the start that he saw no reason to keep investing in a mistake. He let our military presence in Iraq lapse, and left the Iraqi government to fend for itself when it was still far too fragile. There is a reason we stayed in Germany and Japan and South Korea for decades after the fighting stopped: We didn’t want our sacrifices to be for nothing, and we didn’t want to have to fight again.
Now the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS — the very al-Qaeda forces we defeated in Iraq in 2007 — have come back and taken over huge swaths of the country, including most of the Sunni heartland to the west and north of Baghdad. Meanwhile, over in next-door Syria, Obama stood by while the rebels fighting Bashar Assad came under the dominance of extreme Islamist forces, and then sold them all out with the chemical-weapons deal in September 2013. Consequently, we have thrown the Iraqi government into a de facto alliance with the murderous Baathist regime in Syria — a feat that not even common enemies and a common ideology could achieve during Saddam’s rule — and now both governments find themselves increasingly dependent on Iran.
With Iran’s power and prestige thus enhanced, and rapidly filling the vacuum left behind by the U.S., the mullahs now see the possibility at long last of extending the Islamic Revolution across the Fertile Crescent. With our impending agreement to let Iran keep its nuclear-weapons programs, we can now settle comfortably into the role of a de facto subordinate ally of Iran, whose forces we may soon be helping with air strikes in Iraq. If you’re wondering where that leaves our actual allies among the Gulf kingdoms and Israel, they are wondering the same thing.
Foreign-policy mistakes are inevitable, and should generally be expected, if not always forgiven. But in its approach to Iraq and the Middle East as a whole, the Obama administration has been criminally negligent. It could be years and maybe decades before we see a situation as good as the one Obama found when he got to office — and things are almost certainly going to get far worse before they get better.
AmericanThinker: When a politician invests so much in trying to prove failure, what are we to expect but failure? ISIS was nearly dead and buried in 2008 following the surge. The fact that they were able to reconstitute themselves is due to two factors; the Syrian civil war where they first went to fight and recruit; and the policies of Prime Minister Maliki that angered Sunnis and fed Sunni paranoia about Shiite dominance. Both factors existed because Barack Obama failed to back the secular opposition (or, at least, the non-jihadist opposition) in Syria and because there was no restraining influence of American troops in Iraq, Maliki brought down the hammer on Sunnis.Related links: Fighters abandoning al-Qaeda affiliates to join Islamic State, U.S. officials say
In a very real sense, Loyola is right. It is decisions made by the president that has led directly to the situation Iraq finds itself in today. Restarting the war? He practically encouraged it with his policies.
ISIS used to be al-Qaeda in Iraq
Obama: Bad Intelligence Behind ISIS Underestimation (King of Blame!)
