At a Saturday press conference, a reporter asked President Obama a question that's been on our mind since Obama announced a new U.S. military intervention in Iraq: "Mr. President, do you have any second thoughts about pulling all ground troops out of Iraq? And does it give you pause as the U.S.--is it doing the same thing in Afghanistan?"
"What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision," Obama replied. "Under the previous administration, we had turned over the country to a sovereign, democratically elected Iraqi government."
Of course Obama is correct that the disposition of the U.S. troop presence was not solely "my decision." With Iraqi sovereignty restored, Washington and Baghdad would both have to consent to a status-of-forces agreement, or SOFA. In the president's telling, the Iraqis balked at signing a SOFA unless the U.S. agreed to unacceptable conditions.Yes, Obama is not only disclaiming responsibility for the troop pullout but blaming it on George W. Bush--among others, as we shall see, but "the previous administration" is the first target of his pointed finger.
"We needed assurances that our personnel would be immune from prosecution if, for example, they were protecting themselves and ended up getting in a firefight with Iraqis, that they wouldn't be hauled before an Iraqi judicial system," the president said. The Iraqis rejected that demand. "So let's just be clear: The reason that we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq was because . . . a majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there, and politically they could not pass the kind of laws that would be required to protect our troops in Iraq."
In an April story for The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins painted a more complicated picture. U.S. military commanders told Filkins that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki "said that he wanted to keep [U.S.] troops in Iraq," but that "parliament would forbid the troops to stay unless they were subject to local law." But "President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq":
For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis--like how many troops they wanted to leave behind--because the Administration had not decided. "We got no guidance from the White House," [James] Jeffrey [the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad in 2011] told me. "We didn't know where the President was. Maliki kept saying, 'I don't know what I have to sell.' " At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn't have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama Administration quickly rejected the idea. "The American attitude was: Let's get out of here as quickly as possible," Sami al-Askari, [an] Iraqi member of parliament, said.
This account is consistent with Obama's inasmuch as the Iraqis were making what the Americans regarded as an unreasonable demand. But it also suggests that Obama was eager for a complete pullout and thus happy to see the talks fail.
As The Weekly Standard's John McCormack notes, Obama himself said as much, during the third 2012 presidential debate with Mitt Romney:
Romney: With regards to Iraq, you and I agreed, I believe, that there should have been a status-of-forces agreement. Did you--
Obama: That's not true.
Romney: Oh, you didn't--you didn't want a status of forces agreement?
Obama: No, but what I--what I would not have done is left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down. That certainly would not help us in the Middle East.
The president went on to repeat that argument Saturday, just after he disavowed responsibility for the withdrawal:
Having said all that, if in fact the Iraqi government behaved the way it did over the last five, six years, where it failed to pass legislation that would reincorporate Sunnis and give them a sense of ownership; if it had targeted certain Sunni leaders and jailed them; if it had alienated some of the Sunni tribes that we had brought back in during the so-called Awakening that helped us turn the tide in 2006--if they had done all those things and we had had troops there, the country wouldn't be holding together either. The only difference would be we'd have a bunch of troops on the ground that would be vulnerable. And however many troops we had, we would have to now be reinforcing, I'd have to be protecting them, and we'd have a much bigger job. And probably, we would end up having to go up again in terms of the number of grounds troops to make sure that those forces were not vulnerable.
So that entire analysis is bogus and is wrong. But it gets frequently peddled around here by folks who oftentimes are trying to defend previous policies that they themselves made.
So he made the right decision when he made the decision that wasn't his decision to make.
Keep in mind that the question Obama was asked was whether he had second thoughts about the decision to withdraw all ground troops from Iraq. He could have simply said no and then delivered what turned out to be the latter half of his answer: that a continued troop presence would have provided little benefit to Iraq and imposed great costs on the U.S. So why did he first go through the exercise of blaming others, including George W. Bush, for the pullout? That implies that he does have second thoughts.
But if the president's disavowal of responsibility for the withdrawal seems at odds with his insistence that it was a good policy, there is a common thread that ties them together: a determination not to acknowledge error.
What, Me Worry? 
This 2007 post from The American Prospect's website doesn't look good in retrospect:
So I finished reading Fiasco by Tom Ricks last night, and I really should take back some of the mean things I said about him over the summer. It really is an excellent book, and you should all read it.
But I was struck by the ending of Ricks' book--he explores what the likely scenarios are in Iraq, and his "nightmare" scenario (the worst of the worst, presumably) is the establishment of a Muslim Caliphate in Iraq.
Funny. I really, really don't understand why I'm supposed to find this outcome terrifying.
The post's authorship is unclear: It says "posted by John," apparently a Canadian blogger, but the byline is Ezra Klein, who was an associate editor at TAP before joining the Washington Post in 2009. The likeliest interpretation is that it was John's idea and Ezra liked it enough to put it on his blog.
The old post caught our attention because of this Klein tweet Friday: "What ISIS gets wrong about the Caliphate"--followed by a link to a piece by Max Fisher on Klein's new site, Vox.com, titled "9 Questions About the ISIS Caliphate You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask."
Question 1 is "What is a Caliphate." Answer: "A caliphate is a an Islamic state--and then some." The word "evokes the idea of a glorious and unified Islamic civilization, which is what the first caliphates were." There were multiple caliphates between 632, when the Prophet Muhammad died, and 1924, "when the office [of caliph] was abolished by then-Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk" following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
But according to Fisher, today's jihadists have it all wrong, as he explains in Question 8, which is a rhetorical one:
The caliphate was in fact a place of ultra-conservative Islam and anti-modern intolerance, right?
Wrong! That's what jihadists, like today's ISIS leaders, want it to be, because they themselves wish to run an oppressive, intolerant, anti-modern, ultra-conservative state. But this is a fantasy they've constructed to justify their much more modern ideas about ultra-conservatism and their romanticizing an era that went very differently than they imagine.
Fisher quotes from a New York Times op-ed by Khaled Diab, "an Egyptian-Belgian journalist based in Jerusalem," who touts the Baghdad-based Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258) as a liberal bastion:
Abbasid society during its heyday thrived on multiculturalism, science, innovation, learning and culture--in sharp contrast to ISIS' violent puritanism. The irreverent court poet of the legendary Caliph Harun al-Rashid (circa 763-809), Abu Nuwas, not only penned odes to wine, but also wrote erotic gay verse that would make a modern imam blush.
Hence Fisher's conclusion:
The fact that the present-day, terrorist-run "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria has so little in common with the original caliphates is beside the point. They're fighting for a mythical memory they've constructed. Unfortunately for Iraqis and Syrians coming under ISIS's rule, enough people believe in that myth to fight and kill for it.
It reminds us of the way the left used to explain away the atrocities of communist states: Communism, they would say, is a wonderful idea. It just hasn't been tried.
We Blame George W. Bush 
"The Right's Impeachment Trap: How Pundits Blame Obama for GOP Extremism"--headline, Salon.com, Aug. 8