HILLARY CLINTON WAS A VOCAL ADVOCATE FOR US TROOPS TO STAY IN IRAQ

…Hillary Clinton & her questionable partner, the former Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki

 

Donald Trump is wrong to blame Hillary Clinton for the decisions on leaving Iraq.

 

OK, let’s get some basic truths straight about the rise of ISIS, the US exiting from Iraq, and where the president and Hillary Clinton have been on opposite sides regarding the US withdrawal from Iraq.

 

First, the date and decision to leave Iraq and to not leave a small US force, that drawdown date of US forces in Iraq by Dec. 31, 2011, that deadline was set three years earlier by the George W. Bush administration.  The Obama administration and Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with that decision.

 

The decision to draw down the two mid-east wars, whether it was right or wrong, it was a promise made throughout Obama’s election campaign.  He had pledged to wind down America’s wars and he told the troops multiple times that “the war in Iraq will end”.

 

 

Donald Trump continues to blame Hillary Clinton for her part in the decision to leave Iraq.  The reality is that current and former Obama administration officials today still defend Clinton as one of the most vocal advocates for a muscular US presence to be left in Iraq after the withdrawal deadline. Clinton has argued publicly and privately for keeping a contingent of US troops in Iraq after Dec. 31, 2011. 

 

When that effort failed, Hillary lobbied the White House and Congress for money  to        fund civilian-run contractor security programs in Iraq.  In written memos and in meetings as part of the president’s national security team, Hillary questioned Iraqi President Maliki, the Shiite leader’s ability to keep the country united and she warned that instability could lead to a resurgence of al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, the terrorist group that later renamed itself the Islamic State (ISIS).

 

The downscaling in Iraq was done over the objections of US military leaders on the ground.  They said the slashing of key assistance programs — in a few cases, by more than 90% — left the US government increasingly in the dark about developments outside the Iraqi capital.  Some former officers who managed Iraqi aid programs say the cuts were a factor in the slow deterioration of Iraq’s security forces in the months before the Islamic State’s 2014 assault.

 

 

Hillary recognized that AQI was down, but not out.  She had pressed the Iraqis, to “keep taking the fight to them.”  But, in scaling back contractor assistance to Iraq, Clinton’s aides had to cut aggressively and sometimes unwisely, internal auditors have concluded. The reductions met cost-cutting goals but did not “fully consider US foreign policy priorities in Iraq”.  Some of the cuts were not fully implemented until after Clinton’s departure in early 2013, though the plans were largely in place. The report is silent on Clinton’s role in the reductions or views about them.

 

“There was a period of time after the transition from the military-led mission to a civilian-led mission when strategic decisions were not made, with one official calling the period ‘a strategic vacuum,’ ” the inspector general’s office said this in its 2013 report, citing interviews with department officials in Washington and Iraq. It said the cuts were driven by “Congressional and White House concerns that the Department quickly reduce costs and security vulnerabilities and address the Iraqi government’s desire for a more normalized US diplomatic presence.”

 

Contingency plans created in 2010 envisioned taking over key security missions, such as the tribal reconciliation program. Another initiative called for building new diplomatic and intelligence outposts around the country to give the United States a presence in cities that once hosted American military bases. These facilities, called “Enduring Presence Posts,” or EPPs, were initially planned for five Iraqi locations..

 

State Department officials urged Congress to approve funding for the EPP’s, saying the listening posts would help “mitigate ethno-sectarian conflict” while allowing the security officials to better “forecast, prevent or contain instability outside of Baghdad.”  “Spotting emerging problems early is going to be critical,” Clinton’s aides wrote in a 2010 staff report to lawmakers. The report raised concerns about the department’s ability to carry out some of its new mandates without US military support, but it urged congressional appropriators to put up the necessary financial backing.

 

 Vice President Joe Biden’s office declined to comment on the troop reductions, although his aides said the cuts reflected the prevailing view at the White House and on Capitol Hill: that a large civilian force of contract personnel in Iraq would not be sustainable once US troops were gone.   “The president made the decisions on the military drawdown, and it was the president’s directive that they were all executing. On the civilian side, the White House’s big worry was the security of our people. Once the decision was made that we weren’t going to have the authority to keep our military there — and even before it was made — they knew they not only couldn’t afford to keep growing, but they had to reduce. At one point, the US had the biggest civilian contractor footprint in the world.”

An early casualty in Iraq was direct US support for Iraq’s Counter Terrorism Service. The number of embedded US advisers to the elite terrorist-fighting unit dropped from more than 100 before the military withdrawal to just two advisers.  Another key Pentagon program that helped the US government collect and analyze intelligence about terrorist activities was scrapped. The aide who ran the program, said the scuttling of the project resulted in the loss of an important window into Iraq that could have provided Americans and Iraqis with “a better awareness of what al-Qaeda in Iraq was up to.”

 

The Sunni protests against Maliki then erupted in 2012 and the number of suicide bombings in Iraq started to rise. The terrorist predecessors of the Islamic State began gaining strength across Iraq, aided by the worsening sectarian tensions as well as the fighting next door in Syria, where the civil war gave jihadist leaders a cause and a safe haven in which to rebuild.

On June 4, 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS), in a quick strike, captured Mosul in Iraq. The black-flagged terrorists blew past Iraqi army defenders, aided in many cases by Sunni tribesmen who saw the jihadists as preferable to Maliki’s Shiite-led government.  Millions of dollars of US provided equipment and armored vehicles were abandoned to the Islamic State by the Iraqi military.

 

 

The point of all these former statements is that whether the additional security assistance could have helped prevent the collapse of Iraq’s security services is impossible to say with certainty. Many current and former administration officials, including some who strongly favored a residual US troop presence, they argue that Maliki’s inept management of the military and repression of the country’s Sunni minority inalterably weakened the country and made it vulnerable to a collapse to ISIS. If a few hundred Americans had been stationed in Mosul in 2014, these officials also say, they might have instead become some prized targets for the terrorist army that overran the city that summer.

 

In any case, the Islamic State’s takeover prompted a rush by the Obama administration to restore military-led security assistance programs that had been curtailed after the military drawdown. Within weeks, 475 US troops were sent to advise Iraqi security forces. Today, the level is more than 10 times that. The concern over tight budgets has faded as well: Congress has appropriated billions of dollars to deal with the jihadist threat.

 

Today, Hillary Clinton, the presidential candidate, has responded to the crisis by putting forward a detailed plan for defeating the Islamic State. She has blamed Maliki, the former Iraqi leader and her former partner during the transition for the resurgence of the Sunni terrorists. Some of her proposed solutions have called for improving tribal liaisons and intelligence collection programs that were cut or abandoned three years earlier.

 

“We’ve got to do a better job of getting back the Sunnis on the ground,” she told ABC News in an interview.

 

Clinton has stressed her experience and track record in the national security arena as a key selling point on the campaign trail, echoing themes from her memoir, “Hard Choices,” which chronicled her experiences as US Secretary of State. The book came out only a few weeks after Mosul fell to the Islamic State.

 

The book at the time made big news because of Clinton’s admission that it was a “mistake” to have voted in 2002 to support the US invasion of Iraq the following year.  A statement she continues to make.

 

The point of all this is to show that Donald Trump is wrong when he blames Hillary Clinton’s role as the Secretary of State for the rise of ISIS and for what happened later in Iraq.  Since day one, she has been against how Iraq was dealt with from George W. Bush’s decision to fully pull out, and to President Obama’s complete withdrawal promise fulfillment.

 

She was also right that she and many others in the US Congress and the country were seriously misled by bad intelligence for invading Iraq.

 

But as the former Secretary of State, Colin Powell had said, “You break it, you own it!”

 

Hillary was and is willing to deal with “owning it”, but President Obama has had other “fish to fry” in trying to fulfill his campaign promise for getting out of two foreign wars.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016