Blame the Obama doctrine for Iraq

First, the administration began insisting that any agreement with Maliki be approved by the fractious Iraqi parliament; a virtually impossible demand (and, as seen with this week’s immunity agreement just between Obama and Maliki, an unnecessary demand). But it never even got to that point: political aides in the White House, worried about Obama’s 2012 re-election bid, pushed back hard against Pentagon requests for roughly 15,000 residual troops, eventually convincing Obama to approve only 3,500. Maliki—no Thomas Jefferson to begin with—was not about to risk his political life over such an insignificant contingent. America and Iraq agreed to go their separate ways.

None of this should actually be surprising. Though Obama would now like to airbrush history, we all remember that “ending the Iraq war” was an unyielding promise of his 2008 presidential run. And we all remember that in his reelection campaign Obama repeatedly touted his decision to bring all troops home from Iraq: in September 2012 he exclaimed, “Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did.”

The bottom line is the Iraq withdrawal was not some aberration to now be politically jostled over; it was a proud part of Obama’s broader foreign policy “doctrine” based on reducing and limiting America’s role in the world, in order to focus on “nation building at home.” There is nothing wrong with those sentiments, and they certainly appeal to an American public that is war weary—and world weary—after more than a dozen years of overseas conflicts following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.