Jeb Bush delivered a thoughtful and clear-eyed speech on Tuesday about the threat posed by ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism. It was a forward-looking speech that offered a compelling strategy to deal with this growing threat (something we haven’t heard from Hillary Clinton).
Bush’s speech also looked back at the history of the violence in Syria and Iraq that brought us to this point, as well as at the role Iran has played in fueling terrible conflicts that have given rise to ISIS.
As governor of Florida, Jeb Bush had no more role in the decision to go to war in Iraq than did Barack Obama–and far less of a role than then-Senator Hillary Clinton, who voted for it–he deserves credit for acknowledging the flawed intelligence that led us into war, and the military and strategic missteps that kept us at war for longer than any of us expected or wanted.
As a former Army intelligence officer and Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who spent multiple tours in Iraq, I experienced firsthand America’s challenging history in Iraq. A critical lesson of this history is not whether we should have gone in at all, but rather the failure to stabilize the country and apply the right strategy in the wake of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. That’s a lesson military officers who served in Iraq have learned, and it’s one Jeb Bush understands.
By contrast, the Clinton/Obama intervention in Libya without a plan to stabilize that country after Qaddafi’s fall stands as an enduring testament to an all too frequent failure to learn from history. For that matter, so does their disengagement and ultimate withdrawal from Iraq, which left a vacuum Iran and ISIS were only too happy to fill.
When we aren’t ignoring history, we are often busy re-writing it, as Clinton and her defenders have done.
I was there. I saw the worst of our Iraq strategy and the best. During the surge, which undoubtedly saved Iraq from chaos, I came to know the Iraqis who fought side-by-side with our soldiers to take their country back from AQI and from the Iranian-backed militias. I am convinced that had senators Clinton and Obama been successful in blocking the surge in 2007 that we would have seen a victory for AQI in Anbar and a victory for Iran in Baghdad.
After President Obama and Secretary Clinton took their respective offices in 2009, I watched the hard-won gains of the surge erode as America disengaged politically and militarily from Iraq.
Even after I moved to the Afghanistan fight in late 2009 to help General Petraeus implement a strategy to stabilize Afghanistan, I heard frequently from Iraqi friends who felt increasingly abandoned by America. They begged for more attention from Washington. They wanted to extend the American presence. They warned of increasing Iranian influence. These Iraqis came to believe the administration did not want to stay, and American military commanders came to the same conclusion as the White House continually whittled down the size of the residual force they believed necessary to preserve the gains of the surge.
The Obama/Clinton defense rests on a thin reed of claiming President George W. Bush agreed to an end date for America’s presence in Iraq. This is misleading. The plan was to renegotiate an extension based on the conditions on the ground. U.S. military advisors believed a continued presence was necessary, and our Iraqi partners desired such a presence even if their own politics complicated negotiations to secure it. Our senior military leaders said that Iraqi security forces were not prepared to succeed without continued U.S. forces as the ISF needed continued enabling support and U.S. higher-end intelligence for counter-terrorism targeting. Importantly, in October 2011 all but 40 members of Iraqi parliament voted in favor of a continued U.S. military presence, but only the Kurds would openly support the immunity requirements as framed by the administration. Clearly this was a failure to engage early enough and with a commitment to achieving a longer-term presence secure the hard fought gains made by our military. Unfortunately, the Obama strategic team saw this only through a domestic political lens, thinking that if Iraq spun out of control they were immune politically and would just blame George Bush.
Securing this agreement was a task for diplomacy, but the fact that Secretary Clinton visited Iraq exactly once during her tenure suggests securing this agreement was not terribly high on her agenda.
In ignoring her absenteeism, the Obama/Clinton narrative also ignores the administration’s effort to whittle down the size of the residual force recommended by the commanders on the ground, along with other impediments thrown up by the administration.
President Obama reportedly refused to accept an extension unless it was agreed to by the Iraqi parliament, even though Prime Minister Maliki was willing to guarantee legal protections for U.S. soldiers on his own authority. What was unacceptable for President Obama in 2011 was acceptable in 2014, when he sent U.S. troops back to Iraq without parliamentary approval.
In any event, the Obama administration failed at a critical and achievable diplomatic task. American forces withdrew from Iraq, and Iran was the primary beneficiary of this vacuum. Tehran’s influence grew, and with it so did Maliki’s sectarianism. Iraq’s Sunnis were increasingly disenfranchised and persecuted, and our Sunni and Kurdish partners were abandoned.
Obama and Clinton did not create ISIS, but their policies undeniably contributed to conditions that facilitated its rise. Moreover, the many intelligence warnings about the threat from ISIS, particularly the Defense Intelligence Agency, were ignored in 2013 and 2014 as the administration did not want to be “bothered” by Iraq. Iraqis also bear responsibility for letting old hatreds boil over and for failing to take advantage of the historic opportunity provided by the surge to make enduring political compromises to put decades of oppression and brutality behind them. America should have been there to help them seize this opportunity not because of a moral obligation, or even because of our own precious sacrifice of blood and treasure there, but because Iraq’s retreat into bloodshed would threaten American national security.
Those of us steeped in America’s history in Iraq knew this. We warned the Clinton State Department. We warned the Obama White House. Our warnings fell on deaf ears, and we are paying the price today for a strategy of disengagement and inaction.
Although Secretary Clinton’s defenders would prefer to focus on the history of the Iraq war, it is important to note another history that played a critical role in the growth of ISIS. And that is the abject failure of the Obama/Clinton approach to Syria. Obama and Clinton called for Assad to go but did nothing to make it happen. They drew a line in the sand on chemical weapons, and then allowed Assad to trample all over it. They promised help to the Free Syrian Army, but failed to deliver meaningful help. And out of the chaos and violence that ensued, it is little surprise that Syrian Sunnis turned to the well-armed extremists of ISIS to protect themselves against the brutality of the regime and its Iranian-backers.
The rest of the story is well known to anyone who opens a newspaper: It is the present chaos that threatens us. The catastrophe of Syria has nothing to do with George W. Bush. It unfolded under the tenure of President Obama and Secretary Clinton.
Governor Bush’s cannot seriously be asked to answer for his brother’s record, but Secretary Clinton and President Obama surely should answer for their own.
