Was Obama wrong to withdraw troops from Iraq?

With ISIS on the march and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki defiant, it is tempting to think the current administration could have done something different to keep Iraq from reaching this precipice. History, however, provides no evidence that a longer U.S. troop presence would have made the difference between state cohesion and state collapse. Unlike wine and violins, nation-building does not improve over time. It just costs more, in money and lives.

In the record of U.S. military interventions, the clearest destabilizing force is not the departure of U.S. military forces, but their arrival, with ambitious political projects in hand. It follows then that the eight-year U.S.-led occupation in Iraq was not a golden opportunity for nation-building, and certainly not one that would have worked out given a few more years. The occupation was an imprudent attempt to mold politics in the developing world and Americans will probably remember it that way, as a slow motion Somalia or a slightly abridged Vietnam.