Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton blamed former President George W. Bush for President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw troops from Iraq during Monday night’s first presidential debate.
“The only way that American troops could have stayed in Iraq is to get an agreement from the then-Iraqi government that would have protected our troops, and the Iraqi government would not give that,” Clinton said.
Clinton’s accusation resurrects a Democratic establishment narrative that Bush’s 2008 status of forces (SOFA) agreement tied Obama’s hands on Iraq withdrawal, and implicitly that he is really responsible for the rise of Islamic State.
The only trouble is the SOFA narrative is flat out false.
Bush’s 2008 status of forces agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqi government stated that “all the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.” Even with the stated goal, the caveat was always that its execution would depend on the current status of ground operations.
Experts who served in Iraq at the time, along with several members of Obama’s own National Security Council, dispute the idea that a SOFA could not be renegotiated based on the situation on the ground at the time.
Experts generally agree that the hasty retreat, both diplomatically and militarily, from Baghdad resulted in the isolation of Sunnis, the demoralization and corruption of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), and what turned into fertile ground for ISIS’s initial rise.
“Obama didn’t try,” Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Bill Roggio previously explained to The Daily Caller News Foundation. Roggio continued “there certainly were restrictions with the agreement that was in place, [but] they just didn’t want to do it.”
The U.S. military strongly opposed complete withdrawal from Iraq at the time. Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, the ground commander of the Iraq War at the time, developed plans to keep 24,000 troops in Iraq after 2011. The military believed it could continue its honest broker role, and maintain security should the security situation deteriorate.
Obama’s political appointees were reportedly highly suspicious of the military, thinking they were being forced to a Korea style permanent occupation, which Obama derided in his 2008 presidential campaign.
Leon Panetta, who served as Obama’s CIA director and later as secretary of defense, publicly dissented with Obama’s decision to withdraw after leaving office. Panetta wrote in his post administration memoirs, “it was clear to me — and many others — that withdrawing all our forces would endanger the fragile stability.”
Obama’s defenders counter that they let the Department of State lead negotiations with the Iraqi government for a revised SOFA, but were rebuffed by a reluctant Iraqi government. Panetta responded to these claims, saying The White House “never led” the negotiations, and that “without the President’s active advocacy, al-Maliki was allowed to slip away.”
Ali Khedery, the longest serving U.S. diplomat in Iraq, wrote in 2014 that after the U.S. withdrew “Maliki broke nearly every promise he made to share power with his political rivals,” just as he had warned the Obama administration in 2010. Khadery continues, “under these circumstances, renewed ethno-sectarian civil war in Iraq was not a possibility. It was a certainty.”
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