What Happened to 'Iraqi Freedom'

Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal:

 Ten Years Ago,

an Honorable War Began With Wide Support

Now the U.S. has bailed out of Iraq

leaving behind little trace.

And a strongman is in charge.

 

.... On the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom ... well over 70% of the American public supported upending the Saddam regime.  The temptation to depict the war as George W. Bush's and Dick Cheney's is convenient but utterly false. 

This was a war waged with congressional authorization, with the endorsement of popular acceptance [over 70%], and with the sanction of more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for Iraq's disarmament.

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It was no fault of the soldiers who fought this war, or of the leaders who launched it, that their successors lacked the patience to stick around Iraq and safekeep what had been gained at an incalculable cost in blood and treasure.

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Thanks largely to the farpotchket fumbling of Neville Obama, Iraq will soon be -- if it isn't already -- an Iranian colony or protectorate. The terrible pity is that future generations are likely to conclude that all the American blood and treasure spent over there was squandered. What a damning indictment that will be. This is what happens when a feckless people turn over the governance of the world's most powerful nation to a handful of small and feckless hacks.

[amspirnational]

Obama in fact pressured Maliki under the table to allow the troops to stay longer but he refused to give them immunity. Some folks also would have us still in Vietnam fighting an unbeatable insurgency (ies in Iraq) propping an improppable puppet. Yeah, the US can do anything if it only believes in itself, and there can be Eretz Israel too, that's the ticket. More rude awakenings in store for both.