“We must begin a phased withdrawal of our forces [in Iraq] … with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 30th, 2008.” – Presidential candidate Barack Obama
“So tonight I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended.” – President Obama in 2010.
“Today I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will be home at the end of the year.” – President Obama in 2011
“That entire analysis [that he pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq] is bogus and wrong.” – President Obama in 2014
Partly as a result of the total withdrawal of U.S. forces in Iraq, the nation has became a Jihadist-driven bloodbath, perpetrated by radical Sunni Muslims seeking to carve out a new state called ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/al-Sham). To further this goal, ISIS members have gone on murderous rampages, and the world watched in horror as 50,000 Kurdish-speaking Yazidis clung to the mountainside of Iraq’s Mt. Sinjar, facing imminent death by ISIS forces.
At which point, with extreme reluctance, President Obama finally reversed himself, ordering limited air strikes on ISIS forces in Iraq. As for a U.S. troop presence, what size, when, for how long, or even if it will happen, is not yet clear.
But one thing is clear. The president, who campaigned in 2008 on the promise to pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq, who reiterated that promise in 2010, and who boasted that he had kept that promise in 2011, is now saying that he never made the decision to pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq. It was the Iraqis who forced him to pull them all out.
The president claims that he intended to keep a residual force in Iraq, provided that the Iraqi government under then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki guaranteed legal immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops in the event that, as President Obama put it, “they were protecting themselves and ended up getting in a firefight with Iraqis, that they wouldn’t be hauled before an Iraqi judicial system.”
Alas, the president says, the Iraqi Parliament wouldn’t approve such an immunity guarantee, forcing him to remove all U.S. troops. Actually, Prime Minister Maliki said he could bypass Parliament by signing an executive agreement guaranteeing immunity, but Obama insisted that only if Iraq’s Parliament made the guarantee would he keep residual forces in Iraq.
What’s wrong with this picture? President Obama, who routinely issues executive orders in order to bypass Congress, and who repeatedly violates the Constitution by ignoring the laws passed by Congress, is now insisting that the Iraqi version of Congress, its Parliament, not the executive branch, its prime minister, has the final say on this issue!
