Welcoming Own Defeat

America abandoned Iraq to the tender mercies of the most fanatic Islamists when we pulled out our forces. If the Obama administration had tried, we could have achieved a status of forces agreement that would have spared US troops local prosecution by Iraqi courts that would have facilitated US forces remaining to secure Iraq, but Obama really wanted to pull out. Obama is prematurely withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan as well, before that country has the ability to maintain stability by itself. We have US troops in Germany and Okinawa sixty-nine years after World War II ended, and soldiers in South Korea maintaining the peace sixty-one years after major hostilities ended, so long-term US commitment is not such an unusual thing. Barack Hussein Obama was determined to prove George W. Bush wrong and draw down in Iraq right away. In so doing, Obama left a power vacuum that was inevitably going to be filled by Muslim fanatics of one stripe or the other. It could have been the Shiite Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr that won out, but in the event, it turns out it is Sunni radicals filling the void. Iraq could have remained largely pacified with enough US boots on the ground, but to Obama, maintaining a decisive American military presence there would have shown Bush was right, and that could never be allowed to stand.