By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation
anti–Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration
is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s the defense minister of Iran who flies
into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who’s in charge — while the U.S. air
campaign proves futile and America’s alleged strategy for combating the Islamic
State is in free fall.
It gets worse. The Gulf States’ top leaders, betrayed and
bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama’s failed Camp David summit. “We
were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years,” laments Saudi
Arabia’s former intelligence chief.
Note: “were,” not “are.”
We are scraping bottom. Following six years of President
Obama’s steady and determined withdrawal from the Middle East, America’s
standing in the region has collapsed. And yet the question incessantly asked of
the various presidential candidates is not about that. It’s a retrospective
hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we
know now?
First, the question is not just a hypothetical, but an
inherently impossible hypothetical. It contradicts itself. Had we known there
were no weapons of mass destruction, the very question would not have arisen.
The premise of the war — the basis for going to the U.N., to the Congress, and,
indeed, to the nation — was Iraq’s possession of WMD in violation of the
central condition for the cease-fire that ended the first Gulf War. No WMD, no
hypothetical to answer in the first place.
Second, the “if you knew then” question implicitly
locates the origin and cause of the current disasters in 2003. As if the fall
of Ramadi was predetermined then, as if the author of the current regional
collapse is George W. Bush.
This is nonsense. The fact is that by the end of Bush’s
tenure, the war had been won. You can argue that the price of that victory was
too high. Fine. We can debate that until the end of time. But what is not
debatable is that it was a victory. Bush bequeathed to Obama a success. By
whose measure? By Obama’s. As he told the troops at Fort Bragg on December 14,
2011, “We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a
representative government that was elected by its people.” This was, said the
president, a “moment of success.”
Which Obama proceeded to fully squander. With the 2012
election approaching, he chose to liquidate our military presence in Iraq. We
didn’t just withdraw our forces. We abandoned, destroyed, or turned over our
equipment, stores, installations, and bases. We surrendered our most valuable
strategic assets, such as control of Iraqi airspace, soon to become the
indispensable conduit for Iran to supply and sustain the Assad regime in Syria
and cement its influence all the way to the Mediterranean. And, most relevant
to the fall of Ramadi, we abandoned the vast intelligence network we had so
painstakingly constructed in Anbar province, without which our current
patchwork operations there are largely blind and correspondingly feeble.
The current collapse was not predetermined in 2003 but in
2011. Isn’t that what should be asked of Hillary Clinton? We know you think the
invasion of 2003 was a mistake. But what about the abandonment of 2011? Was
that not a mistake?
Madam Secretary: When you arrived at State, al-Qaeda in
Iraq had been crushed and expelled from Anbar. The Iraqi government had from
Basra to Sadr City fought and defeated the radical, Iranian-proxy Shiite
militias. Yet today these militias are back, once again dominating Baghdad. On
your watch, we gave up our position as the dominant influence over a
“sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq” — forfeiting that position
gratuitously to Iran. Was that not a mistake? And where were you when it was
made?
Iraq is now a battlefield between the Sunni jihadists of
the Islamic State and the Shiite jihadists of Iran’s Islamic Republic. There is
no viable center. We abandoned it. The Obama administration’s unilateral
pullout created a vacuum for the entry of the worst of the worst.
And the damage was self-inflicted. The current situation
in Iraq, says David Petraeus, “is tragic foremost because it didn’t have to
turn out this way. The hard-earned progress of the surge was sustained for over
three years.”
Do the math. That’s 2009 through 2011, the first three
Obama years. And then came the unraveling. When? The last U.S. troops left Iraq
on December 18, 2011.
Want to do retrospective hypotheticals? Start there.
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