Krauthammer makes the false assumption that it could have turned out differently. My read from various sources was that given the present Iraqi government, there was no hope of maintaining a palpable, effective presence in Iraq. My understanding is that, faced with the options of a minimal, impotent, presence or nothing, it was the preference of the military, not Obama, for the nothing option.
But it could have turned out differently, just as it did in almost every country where we’ve fought. The Obama Administration made almost no attempt at negotiations, rarely had any contact with the Iraqi government over the issues, and treated the country as a red-headed step-child. The military wanted to keep 20,000 troops, and it was the Obama Administration that shot that idea down, instead limited any future commitment to a token force. Such a small force couldn’t guarantee any security and showed a complete lack of US commitment to stability, so no Iraqi politicians were willing to go out on a limb to support it. That was almost certainly the Administration’s intention, allowing them to point fingers as they made a complete withdrawal.
We similarly withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, against all the advice from the military, and less than two years later we watched helicopters trying to evacuate our embassy.
Or maybe, the Iraqis don’t want us there. One has to hold that out as a possibility. If that is the case, do we have a right to be there?
Actually, we know the Iraqis want us there, and they’re already working with our military on a return of US forces for 2012. Obama will of course shoot that down, but if he’s thrown out of office we should get troops back in sometime in 2013. In the mean time, they’re looking at sending their own troops to the US for continued training.
Jard,
” My understanding is that, faced with the options of a minimal, impotent, presence or nothing, it was the preference of the military, not Obama, for the nothing option.”
Your understanding is absolutely wrong.
Look, without the immunity agreement, any US soldier could be arrested by Iraqi authorities (not exactly known for their incorruptibility) and charged on any trumped-up ‘crime’ that could be dreamed-up. This is not a situation that any American president (even one as debased as BHO) would tolerate, much less the military leaders who would certainly refuse to sign off on it. Faced with those circumstances, it is not all surprising that we are leaving.
BUT! It is far more important to ask why the status of forces (SOF) agreement didn’t get done properly, or on time. Obama (and, to be fair, Hilliary’s clowns at State) refused to support the formation of an Iraqi government that was largely sectarian in nature, pursuing the chimera of a purely secular polity which simply doesn’t exist in the Middle East. The result was (as predicted by virtually every analyst Left and Right at the time) a very weak pseudo-secular coalition, utterly dependent upon the cooperation of a group of small sectarian parties, notably Sadr’s Iranian-dominated extremist Shia group. This gave Sadr the ability to bring down the government pretty much at will, and fundamentally compromised the ability of any American president to effectively negotiate a suitable SOF agreement.
Sure enough, when the crunch came, the Iraqi government could not effectively negotiate an SOF agremeent that would include an immunity clause, and the US didn’t bring any sort of pressure to bear to prevent this. The failure here falls clearly upon Obama and Hillary, though in truth I doubt that either one of them cares much about this.
As for the views of the Iraqi people themselves, virtually all public polling data (admittedly, somewhat sketchy) shows solid majorities in favor of some long-term US presence. An accomodation could have been worked out, but for the idiocy of the admiistrations negotiating strategy.
If the continued SOF agreement required an immunity clause for US troops, it should not come as any surprise that no agreement was reached. In any other nation where the US keeps a troop presence, the host country does not extend immunity to US soldiers; not Japan, not Korea, not Germany, not Qatar. Why should Iraq be any different?
Up until the 1950’s all foreign forces enjoyed immunity under the law of the flag. Since then the host and sending countries have shared jurisdictions. The sending nation has jurisdiction over its military personnel and any crimes they commit in the performance of their duties (their tank runs over somebody), while the host nation has jurisdiction over off-duty thefts, robberies, and crimes committed by military dependents that aren’t merely against other members of the sending nation.
That is a standard part of a Status of Forces Agreement that all nations use when deploying forces abroad or within the EU or NATO.
In the case of Iraq, apparently the only real opposition to immunity was from Moqtada Al-Sadr’s small group of representatives, and their voting block is crucial in the Iraqi Parliament because of the Obama Administration’s previous screw ups, via Hillary’s State Department. Bush stared a heavily armed Al-Sadr down and crushed his militia bands, sending him crying back to Tehran. Either Obama faced an unarmed Al-Sadr and got outmaneuvered, spanked like a baby, and sent whining home, or he agrees with Al-Sadr that the US should pull out and leave the region to Iran and Syria.
As for other immunity agreements we maintain with foreign countries, just look at the ABC’s of Bilateral Immunity Agreements which cover military personnel regarding the International Criminal Court. We have them with Aghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia, Botswana, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Comoros, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, and Cote d’Ivoire.
That the Administration couldn’t negotiate a standard piece of legalese is a testament both to their incompetence and their willingness to badly damage US and regional security to get a few points in the 2012 campaign.
Check your dates. Most of the events you describe happened at the tail end of the Bush Administration. You can check the sources in the Wikipedia article:
Blame Obama and Hillary all you want but they can only play the cards they were dealt by the prior administration. Iraq is a sovereign nation and they can make their own rules if they want to. Do we have an unlimited right to stay in their country? You should ask yourself are we simply occupiers or were we there to foster a sovereign nation?
What you describe in the SOFA’s mentioned is not properly described as immunity. It is a separation of responsibilities for dealing with various civil and criminal infractions. That is not the same as confering immunity in the same sense as diplomats enjoy or as requested for forces in Iraq.
All I got from your Wiki link is that the SOFA was fine in December of 2008, and the Iraqis figured they might need us there for ten more years. Then we elected Obama, and three years later they’re running us out of the country, against even their own wishes, due to his ineptitude. In fact, the Iraqis are blaming Obama for making immunity the sticking point, as they were willing to gloss it over (as is done in most countries) but Obama had his point man make a big public deal of it over there, putting all their politicians on the spot.
Sure, you can try to blame Bush, but that just means that Obama, given three years and the entire aparatus of the US governmentm, including the US military and State Department, is so inept that they can’t fix a minor legal hiccup (with three years of advance notice) agreed upon between a baseball owner and a bunch of goat herders. The average drunk colledge freshman puking in a trash can is more competent than that.
I’m obviously one of the few who just doesn’t see this war as a loss, or as lost.
My sons have both been there, and if I’ve gotta go with what the Iraqi PEOPLE think, I’ll go with what my sons found, not with people who are ‘reporting’ or ‘opining’ on things there.. The people are glad we came, they’re glad we stayed, they are over joyed that we got rid of Saddam and his idiot sons, and since they are gone, things HAVE gotten better.
My reading of history shows that most of what is being said about Iraq and Afghanistan, was said about Japan and to some extent about Germany and Italy too.
Too old fashioned, not educated enough, not willing to change, blah, blah, blah.
But it seems to me that the Japan and Germany took to Democratic styled governments well enough. They did not back slide into their old ways. But having said that, and given the fact that we still have a military presence in Japan and Germany, why do HAVE to leave Iraq or Afghanistan?
Why not take the personnel sitting on their asses in Japan and Germany and move them to Afghanistan and Iraq? Why not put forces where we need them most and move them out of where we don’t need them as badly?
A couple good posts over at Dignified Rant about Iraq:
Krauthammer makes the false assumption that it could have turned out differently. My read from various sources was that given the present Iraqi government, there was no hope of maintaining a palpable, effective presence in Iraq. My understanding is that, faced with the options of a minimal, impotent, presence or nothing, it was the preference of the military, not Obama, for the nothing option.
But it could have turned out differently, just as it did in almost every country where we’ve fought. The Obama Administration made almost no attempt at negotiations, rarely had any contact with the Iraqi government over the issues, and treated the country as a red-headed step-child. The military wanted to keep 20,000 troops, and it was the Obama Administration that shot that idea down, instead limited any future commitment to a token force. Such a small force couldn’t guarantee any security and showed a complete lack of US commitment to stability, so no Iraqi politicians were willing to go out on a limb to support it. That was almost certainly the Administration’s intention, allowing them to point fingers as they made a complete withdrawal.
We similarly withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, against all the advice from the military, and less than two years later we watched helicopters trying to evacuate our embassy.
Or maybe, the Iraqis don’t want us there. One has to hold that out as a possibility. If that is the case, do we have a right to be there?
Actually, we know the Iraqis want us there, and they’re already working with our military on a return of US forces for 2012. Obama will of course shoot that down, but if he’s thrown out of office we should get troops back in sometime in 2013. In the mean time, they’re looking at sending their own troops to the US for continued training.
Jard,
” My understanding is that, faced with the options of a minimal, impotent, presence or nothing, it was the preference of the military, not Obama, for the nothing option.”
Your understanding is absolutely wrong.
Look, without the immunity agreement, any US soldier could be arrested by Iraqi authorities (not exactly known for their incorruptibility) and charged on any trumped-up ‘crime’ that could be dreamed-up. This is not a situation that any American president (even one as debased as BHO) would tolerate, much less the military leaders who would certainly refuse to sign off on it. Faced with those circumstances, it is not all surprising that we are leaving.
BUT! It is far more important to ask why the status of forces (SOF) agreement didn’t get done properly, or on time. Obama (and, to be fair, Hilliary’s clowns at State) refused to support the formation of an Iraqi government that was largely sectarian in nature, pursuing the chimera of a purely secular polity which simply doesn’t exist in the Middle East. The result was (as predicted by virtually every analyst Left and Right at the time) a very weak pseudo-secular coalition, utterly dependent upon the cooperation of a group of small sectarian parties, notably Sadr’s Iranian-dominated extremist Shia group. This gave Sadr the ability to bring down the government pretty much at will, and fundamentally compromised the ability of any American president to effectively negotiate a suitable SOF agreement.
Sure enough, when the crunch came, the Iraqi government could not effectively negotiate an SOF agremeent that would include an immunity clause, and the US didn’t bring any sort of pressure to bear to prevent this. The failure here falls clearly upon Obama and Hillary, though in truth I doubt that either one of them cares much about this.
As for the views of the Iraqi people themselves, virtually all public polling data (admittedly, somewhat sketchy) shows solid majorities in favor of some long-term US presence. An accomodation could have been worked out, but for the idiocy of the admiistrations negotiating strategy.
If the continued SOF agreement required an immunity clause for US troops, it should not come as any surprise that no agreement was reached. In any other nation where the US keeps a troop presence, the host country does not extend immunity to US soldiers; not Japan, not Korea, not Germany, not Qatar. Why should Iraq be any different?
Up until the 1950’s all foreign forces enjoyed immunity under the law of the flag. Since then the host and sending countries have shared jurisdictions. The sending nation has jurisdiction over its military personnel and any crimes they commit in the performance of their duties (their tank runs over somebody), while the host nation has jurisdiction over off-duty thefts, robberies, and crimes committed by military dependents that aren’t merely against other members of the sending nation.
That is a standard part of a Status of Forces Agreement that all nations use when deploying forces abroad or within the EU or NATO.
In the case of Iraq, apparently the only real opposition to immunity was from Moqtada Al-Sadr’s small group of representatives, and their voting block is crucial in the Iraqi Parliament because of the Obama Administration’s previous screw ups, via Hillary’s State Department. Bush stared a heavily armed Al-Sadr down and crushed his militia bands, sending him crying back to Tehran. Either Obama faced an unarmed Al-Sadr and got outmaneuvered, spanked like a baby, and sent whining home, or he agrees with Al-Sadr that the US should pull out and leave the region to Iran and Syria.
As for other immunity agreements we maintain with foreign countries, just look at the ABC’s of Bilateral Immunity Agreements which cover military personnel regarding the International Criminal Court. We have them with Aghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia, Botswana, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Comoros, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, and Cote d’Ivoire.
That the Administration couldn’t negotiate a standard piece of legalese is a testament both to their incompetence and their willingness to badly damage US and regional security to get a few points in the 2012 campaign.
Check your dates. Most of the events you describe happened at the tail end of the Bush Administration. You can check the sources in the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.-Iraq_Status_of_Forces_Agreement
Blame Obama and Hillary all you want but they can only play the cards they were dealt by the prior administration. Iraq is a sovereign nation and they can make their own rules if they want to. Do we have an unlimited right to stay in their country? You should ask yourself are we simply occupiers or were we there to foster a sovereign nation?
What you describe in the SOFA’s mentioned is not properly described as immunity. It is a separation of responsibilities for dealing with various civil and criminal infractions. That is not the same as confering immunity in the same sense as diplomats enjoy or as requested for forces in Iraq.
All I got from your Wiki link is that the SOFA was fine in December of 2008, and the Iraqis figured they might need us there for ten more years. Then we elected Obama, and three years later they’re running us out of the country, against even their own wishes, due to his ineptitude. In fact, the Iraqis are blaming Obama for making immunity the sticking point, as they were willing to gloss it over (as is done in most countries) but Obama had his point man make a big public deal of it over there, putting all their politicians on the spot.
Sure, you can try to blame Bush, but that just means that Obama, given three years and the entire aparatus of the US governmentm, including the US military and State Department, is so inept that they can’t fix a minor legal hiccup (with three years of advance notice) agreed upon between a baseball owner and a bunch of goat herders. The average drunk colledge freshman puking in a trash can is more competent than that.
I’m obviously one of the few who just doesn’t see this war as a loss, or as lost.
My sons have both been there, and if I’ve gotta go with what the Iraqi PEOPLE think, I’ll go with what my sons found, not with people who are ‘reporting’ or ‘opining’ on things there.. The people are glad we came, they’re glad we stayed, they are over joyed that we got rid of Saddam and his idiot sons, and since they are gone, things HAVE gotten better.
My reading of history shows that most of what is being said about Iraq and Afghanistan, was said about Japan and to some extent about Germany and Italy too.
Too old fashioned, not educated enough, not willing to change, blah, blah, blah.
But it seems to me that the Japan and Germany took to Democratic styled governments well enough. They did not back slide into their old ways. But having said that, and given the fact that we still have a military presence in Japan and Germany, why do HAVE to leave Iraq or Afghanistan?
Why not take the personnel sitting on their asses in Japan and Germany and move them to Afghanistan and Iraq? Why not put forces where we need them most and move them out of where we don’t need them as badly?
A couple good posts over at Dignified Rant about Iraq:
http://thedignifiedrant.blogspot.com/2011/11/poised.html
http://thedignifiedrant.blogspot.com/2010/12/festivus-miracle.html
In other news:
Kenya Invades Somalia in Reaction to al Shabaab Attacks
http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/somalia/articles/20111104.aspx
http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/02/world/africa/kenya-battle-islamists-somalia/index.html?hpt=iaf_t4
FARC Leader Killed in Columbia
http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/04/world/americas/colombia-farc-leader-killed/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
I wonder how Obama’s base will react to these events, especially the last one?
Many a toke to be toasted at OWS in memory of Alfonso Cano.