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Who lost Iraq .. Bush or Obama (1-2)?
Monday, 27 November 2017
Washington - Special
In a happy but short and misleading moment, most Americans stopped thinking about Iraq. After US troops withdrew in late 2011, President Barack Obama declared the country "sovereign, stable and self-reliant."
After Iraq returned to chaos with a thief breaking into the country and taking over a third of its territory, questions arose about how to save Iraq. There was even a sharp debate: Who lost Iraq, Bush or Obama ?, which was presented to the magazine "Politico" in Washington, DC.
Would Iraq have remained stable if Obama had left a small contingent of troops? Has Bush's "surge" truly stabilized the country? To answer these questions, Politeco collected 12 experts, including veterans of both departments - the State Department, the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA - in a seemingly simple idea: Who lost Iraq?
The wounds of the Iraqis do not end
Former US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who was in Iraq for the period 2005 to 2007, described the course Iraq had left when he left, and Iraq, which Obama inherited when he began his responsibilities in January 2009, saying: "It was a very difficult period. Especially in the wake of the bombing of the Samarra military mosque in 2006, sectarian violence has become a front and center - a very large number of dead and wounded, Shiites and Sunnis - and the rise of al Qaeda in Iraq. We have begun greater efforts to train Iraqi forces, resulting in substantial growth in their size and capabilities. The new Iraqi government, led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, has shown greater willingness to use force against Shi'ite militias in Basra and Sadr City in Baghdad. In addition, the al-Qaeda abuses in Iraq against the Sunni community have begun to turn some Sunnis against them. With increased communication with the year, we started to have large numbers of them working with us. "
"There are still some unresolved issues - there is no oil law to distribute resources, and there is no reform of the de-Baathification process," Khalilzad said. These were self-inflicted wounds, if you like - the mistakes we made, in my opinion, at first. But I think the Iraqis were moving in the right direction. You had a government that gained greater national legitimacy. There was greater Sunni involvement in the government compared to a previous period. By the end of the Bush administration, the level of violence had dropped significantly compared to 2006 and early 2007. "
In response to a question, will Iraq reach what it was at the beginning of Obama's first term, and is he on a path that could lead him to a place where he can stand alone? The former US ambassador to Baghdad, Chris Hill, pointed out that al-Maliki was acting as if he had got everything, but his ties to the Sunnis on the ground were heading towards recession, which is the opposite of his relationship with the Sunni politicians in his government.
The
retired generals, General Daniel Bulger, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and the book "A General Account for the Iraq War and Afghanistan," said that America had lost Iraq because "the generals - like me - misused our large army. We train, organize and equip our combat to crush the traditional enemy forces, uniforms. Go in, kill 'em and get the hell out. In 2003, we tried to use more than 100,000 of our troops to defeat the established insurgency and build viable democratic institutions in a country that we barely understood. "
"With the passage of time, we learned how to hunt down terrorist leaders. We got a good knowledge of Iraqi society and culture, but we never got a better level of knowledge of the besieged, besieged Iraqi people. They are the real losers of this difficult war, and they have been living in a state of agony and craziness for decades. The last to persecute them is the supporters of those who left us in the field when we retreated in 2011. "
the Iraqian people
US Ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2012, James Jeffrey, a visiting scholar at the Washington Institute for Peace, believes that "Iraq did not put, because if we agree on the idea of loss we should ask who lost Yugoslavia? Who lost Vietnam? But it must be recognized that "it is not a successful country," blaming "the Iraqi people, who overreacted with the American partner. The vast majority of the Iraqi population did not understand American or Western values or show a deep desire to see a national system similar to Western regimes. Despite this, the United States has been working for nearly eight years in an effort to achieve the above goal, without success in the end. "
Tomorrow the second part of the investigation
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