President Obama spent several minutes during a major speech on Monday defending his decision to pull American troops out of Iraq in 2011, rebutting repeated criticism by President-elect Donald Trump that the move uncorked a new terrorist threat.
Despite demanding in 2006 that then-President Bush pull American military forces out of Iraq, Trump has since called Obama the “founder of ISIS” for bringing those troops home.
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During what was his final major policy speech, delivered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., Obama claimed he had no choice and keeping troop in the country wouldn’t have prevented the Islamic State anyway.
“There’s been a debate about ISIL that’s focused on whether a continued U.S. troop presence in Iraq back in 2011 could have stopped the threat of ISIL from growing and, as a practical matter, this was not an option,” Obama said.
Obama said he chose to end America’s military presence in Iraq because Iraqi officials “were unwilling to sign a new status of forces agreement to protect our troops from prosecution if they were trying to defend themselves” in the Middle Eastern country.
“In addition, maintaining American troops in Iraq at the time could not have reduced the forces that contributed to ISIL’s rise: a government in Baghdad that pursued a sectarian agenda, a brutal dictator in Syria who lost control of large parts of the country, social media that reached a global pool of recruits and a hollowing out of Iraq’s security forces,” he said.
“It’s the fault of Obama — there is no question,” the incoming Republican president said last fall in reference to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
“It’s the fault of Bush for going in. It’s the fault of Obama for getting out,” he continued. “It’s a disaster — the war should never have happened, and then once it did happen, you should have at least left the troops in.”
The outgoing Democratic president has promised to ensure a smooth transition of power to the Trump administration, though that has not prevented him or his aides from criticizing the president-elect on several occasions since his surprise victory last month.
