Al Qaeda seizes Mosul

@Greg:

The invasion of Iraq was the Bush Administration’s responsibility, start to finish. They maneuvered us into going there, they called the shots while we were there, and they locked us into a timetable for full military withdrawal with virtually no chance for further negotiations as a final act before walking off the stage.

It was that administration’s responsibility up to the point where there was a peaceful transfer of power to the next administration to take the football and not fumble it. The writing of history doesn’t begin and expire every 4-8 years, based on the U.S. presidential election cycle. Each administration picks up where the previous one left off.

I distinctly remember mata and I in a number of posts pointing out that Obama did not “end the war in Iraq”- that SoFA was signed under Bush (if memory is correct, Obama had wanted it delayed so that he could claim political credit). But there was an understanding that the terms would be renegotiated down the road and based upon conditions on the ground. The Obama administration essentially all but ignored Iraq until late in the game when the withdrawal deadline was suddenly looming over the horizon. They then finally addressed the issue and unsuccessfully tried to renegotiate the SoFA. But it was too late; and it was a failure on the part of the Obama administration.

Condi Rice:

Former President George W. Bush’s administration signed an agreement in 2008 to withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, but policymakers in that administration always expected that agreement to be renegotiated to allow for an extension beyond that deadline, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told The Cable.

When President Barack Obama announced on Oct. 21 that he would withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by Dec. 31, his top advisors contended that since the Bush administration had signed the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), both administrations believed that all troops should be withdrawn by the end of the year. This was part of the Obama administration’s drive to de-emphasize their failed negotiations to renegotiate that agreement and frame the withdrawal as the fulfillment of a campaign promise to end the Iraq war.

“The security agreements negotiated and signed in 2008 by the Bush administration stipulated this date of December 31, 2008, as the end of the military presence. So that has been in law now or been in force now for several years,” Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough told reporters on Oct. 21. “So it’s difficult to rebut the proposition that this was a known date.”

Rice, speaking with The Cable to promote her new book No Higher Honor, said today that when the Bush administration signed the agreement, it was understood by both the U.S. and Iraqi governments that there would be follow-up negotiations aimed at extending the deadline — a step that would be in both the U.S. and Iraqi interest.

“There was an expectation that we would negotiate something that looked like a residual force for our training with the Iraqis,” Rice said. “Everybody believed it would be better if there was some kind of residual force.”

Rice said the Iraqi government, despite SOFA’s Jan. 2012 end date, was not only open to a new agreement that would include an extension for U.S. troops, but expected that a new agreement would eventually be signed.

“We certainly understood that the Iraqis preserved that option and everybody believed that option was going to be exercised,” Rice said.

It’s been widely reported that the negotiations between the Obama administration and the Iraqi government this year broke down over the issue of immunity for U.S. troops in post-2011 Iraq. The Obama administration had demanded that immunity be granted by the Iraqi Council of Representatives, the country’s primary legislative body, which was unwilling to do so for political reasons.

Rice said that she didn’t understand why the Obama administration was unable to reach an agreement on immunity with the Iraqis, considering that the previous SOFA granted immunity to U.S. soldiers and was passed overwhelmingly by the Iraqi parliament at the time.

“We did manage to negotiate an immunity clause that was acceptable to the Iraqis and acceptable to the Pentagon. I don’t know what happened in these negotiations,” Rice said.

More from the Cable:

The Obama administration is claiming it always intended to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year, in line with the president’s announcement today, but in fact several parts of the administration appeared to try hard to negotiate a deal for thousands of troops to remain — and failed.

“I can report that as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” President Barack Obama said today, after speaking with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their held — heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops. That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”

Deputy National Security Advisors Denis McDonough and Tony Blinken said in a White House briefing that this was always the plan.

“What we were looking for was an Iraq that was secure, stable, and self reliant, and that’s what we got here, so there’s no question that was a success,” said McDonough, who traveled to Iraq last week.

But what about the extensive negotiations the administration has been engaged in for months, regarding U.S. offers to leave thousands of uniformed soldiers in Iraq past the deadline? It has been well reported that those negotiations, led by U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and White House official Brett McGurk, had been stalled over the U.S. demand that the remaining troops receive immunity from Iraqi courts.

“What the president preferred was for the best relationship for the United States and Iraq going forward. That’s exactly what we have now,” McDonough said, barely acknowledging the administration’s intensive negotiations.

“We talked about immunities, there’s no question about that…. But the bottom line is that the decision you heard the president talk about today is reflective of his view and the prime minister’s view of the kind of relationship we want to have going forward. That relationship is a normal relationship,” he said.

Of course, the U.S.-Iraqi relationship is anything but normal. Following nine years of war, the death of over 4,000 Americans and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and the disbursement of at least hundreds of billions of dollars of American taxpayer’ money, the United States now stands to have significantly less influence in Iraq than if the administration had been able to come to terms with Iraq over a troop extension, according to experts and officials.

“Iraq is not a normal country, the security environment is not normal, the embassy is not a normal embassy,” said Marisa Cochrane Sullivan, managing director at the Institute for the Study of War, who traveled to Iraq this summer and has been sounding the alarm about what she saw as the mishandling of the negotiations ever since.

For more evidence that the administration actually wanted to extend the troop presence in Iraq, despite today’s words by Obama and McDonough, one only has to look at the statements of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

In July, Panetta urged Iraqi leaders to, “Dammit, make a decision” about the U.S. troop extension. In August, he told reporters that, “My view is that they finally did say, ‘Yes.'” On Oct. 17, he was still pushing for the extension and said, “At the present time I’m not discouraged because we’re still in negotiations with the Iraqis.”

Sullivan was one of 40 conservative foreign policy professionals who wrote to Obama in September to warn that even a residual force of 4,000 troops would “leave the country more vulnerable to internal and external threats, thus imperiling the hard-fought gains in security and governance made in recent years at significant cost to the United States.”

She said that the administration’s negotiating strategy was flawed for a number of reasons: it failed to take into account Iraqi politics, failed to reach out to a broad enough group of Iraqi political leaders, and sent contradictory messages on the troop extension throughout the process.

“From the beginning, the talks unfolded in a way where they largely driven by domestic political concerns, both in Washington and Baghdad. Both sides let politics drive the process, rather than security concerns,” said Sullivan.

As recently as August, Maliki’s office was discussing allowing 8,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops to remain until next year, Iraqi Ambassador Samir Sumaida’ie said in an interview with The Cable. He told us that there was widespread support in Iraq for such an extension, but the Obama administration was demanding that immunity for U.S. troops be endorsed by the Iraqi Council of Representatives, which was never really possible.

Administration sources and Hill staffers also tell The Cable that the demand that the troop immunity go through the Council of Representatives was a decision made by the State Department lawyers and there were other options available to the administration, such as putting the remaining troops on the embassy’s diplomatic rolls, which would automatically give them immunity.

“An obvious fix for troop immunity is to put them all on the diplomatic list; that’s done by notification to the Iraqi foreign ministry,” said one former senior Hill staffer. “If State says that this requires a treaty or a specific agreement by the Iraqi parliament as opposed to a statement by the Iraqi foreign ministry, it has its head up its ass.”

The main Iraqi opposition party Iraqiya, led by former U.S. ally and former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, decided to tie that vote to two non-related issues. It said they would not vote for the troop extension unless Maliki agreed give them control of a high-level policy council and let them choose the minister of defense from their ranks. Maliki wasn’t about to do either.

“It was clear from the beginning that Maliki wasn’t going to make a move without the support of the other parties behind him,” Sullivan explained, adding that the Obama administration focused on Maliki and neglected other actors, such as Allawi. “There was a misunderstanding of how negotiations were unfolding in Iraq. The negotiations got started in earnest far too late.”

“The actions don’t match the words here,” said Sullivan. “It’s in the administration’s interest to make this look not like they failed to reach an agreement and that they fulfilled a campaign promise. But it was very clear that Panetta and [former Defense Secretary Robert] Gates wanted an agreement.”

So what’s the consequence of the failed negotiations? One consequence could be a security vacuum in Iraq that will be filled by Iran.

“It’s particularly troubling because having some sort of presence there would have really facilitated our policy vis-a-vis the Iranians and what’s going on in Syria. The Iranian influence is going up in Iraq,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It makes it harder for us to play our cards, and that’s a real setback. We’ve spent a lot of blood and treasure in Iraq. And these days, stability in that region is not what it used to be.”

Greg wrote:

Obama did little more than preside over the final act of a play that was fully scripted start to finish before he ever showed up.

So the leader of the free world is helpless to flex any influence upon the fluid situation on the ground? The situation in Iraq matters. Whether Saddam should have been removed or not, the right thing to do now- and one tied in to America’s interests and nationals security (all the world needs is another Islamic theocratic state)- is to make sure the blood and treasure we invested into Iraq wasn’t in vain. The blame buck stops with decisions made today by al-Maliki and Obama to deal with what’s going on today- not what happened 11 years ago. When Bush left office, Iraq was on the path to being stabilized post-Surge and Awakening.

Absence of U.S. involvement sounds nice. But it does not make us safe.