It is worthwhile to quote extensively from Filkins’ article. Filkins starts by describing the renewed sectarian violence in Iraq:
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The bombs are back, sometimes a half-dozen a day, nearly always deployed by Sunnis to kill Shiites. … This month’s election will be the first without American supervision. The recent violence, along with [Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s] growing authoritarianism, has prompted many to imagine the future in the darkest terms. … I asked [Hanaa Edwar, who runs a nonprofit called Al-Amal (Hope),] about the elections, whether change might save the country. She looked at me with tired eyes. “We are going into—how do you say it?” she said. “The abyss?” a colleague offered. “Yes—the abyss,” Edwar said. “Yes, yes, yes.”
Filkins then goes on to describe how, in the wake of the success of George Bush’s surge and an election that had produced a plurality of votes for a secular, pro-Western, anti-Iranian candidate, President Obama snatched defeat from the jaws of victory: first, Obama did nothing as Prime Minister Maliki was dictated to by the Shiite regime in Iran; then Obama, against the wishes of all parties involved, simply withdrew all American troops, the only force that was keeping the peace between rival sectarian factions.
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In parliamentary elections [in March of 2010], Maliki’s Shiite Islamist alliance, the State of Law, had suffered an embarrassing loss. The greatest share of votes went to a secular, pro-Western coalition called Iraqiya, led by Ayad Allawi, a persistent enemy of the Iranians. “These were election results we could only have dreamed of,” a former American diplomat told me. “The surge had worked. The war was winding down. And, for the first time in the history of the Arab world, a secular, Western-leaning alliance won a free and fair election.”
But even though Allawi’s group had won the most votes, it had not captured a majority, leaving both him and Maliki scrambling for coalition partners. And despite the gratifying election results, American officials said, the Obama Administration concluded that backing Allawi would be too difficult if he was opposed by Shiites and by their supporters in Iran. “There was no way that the Shia were not going to provide the next Prime Minister,” James Jeffrey, the American Ambassador at the time, told me. “Iraq will not work if they don’t. Allawi was a goner.”
Shortly after the elections, an Iraqi judge, under pressure from the Prime Minister, awarded Maliki the first chance to form a government. The ruling directly contradicted the Iraqi constitution, but American officials did not contest it. “The intent of the constitution was clear, and we had the notes of the people who drafted it,” Sky, the civilian adviser, said. “The Americans had already weighed in for Maliki.”
But it was the meeting with [Qassem Suleimani, who is a commander of the Qods Force, a division of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and who is listed by the United States government as a "terrorist"] that was ultimately decisive. According to American officials, he broke the Iraqi deadlock by leaning on [Moqtada al-Sadr, the Iranian-backed guerrilla commander] to support Maliki, in exchange for control of several government ministries. Suleimani’s conditions for the new government were sweeping. Maliki agreed to make Jalal Talabani, the pro-Iranian Kurdish leader, the new President, and to neutralize the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, which was backed by the C.I.A. Most dramatic, he agreed to expel all American forces from the country by the end of 2011.
The U.S. obtained a transcript of the meeting, and knew the exact terms of the agreement. Yet it decided not to contest Iran’s interference. At a meeting of the National Security Council a month later, the White House signed off on the new regime. Officials who had spent much of the previous decade trying to secure American interests in the country were outraged. “We lost four thousand five hundred Americans only to let the Iranians dictate the outcome of the war? To result in strategic defeat?” the former American diplomat told me. “Fuck that.” At least one U.S. diplomat in Baghdad resigned in protest. And Ayad Allawi, the secular Iraqi leader who captured the most votes, was deeply embittered. “I needed American support,” he told me last summer. “But they wanted to leave, and they handed the country to the Iranians. Iraq is a failed state now, an Iranian colony.”
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The consequences became clear when negotiations began over the crucial question of withdrawing American troops after 2011. The leaders of all the major Iraqi parties had privately told American commanders that they wanted several thousand military personnel to remain, to train Iraqi forces and to help track down insurgents. The commanders told me that Maliki, too, said that he wanted to keep troops in Iraq. But he argued that the long-standing agreement that gave American soldiers immunity from Iraqi courts was increasingly unpopular; parliament would forbid the troops to stay unless they were subject to local law.
President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis—like how many troops they wanted to leave behind—because the Administration had not decided. “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me. “We didn’t know where the President was. Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ” At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama Administration quickly rejected the idea. “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,” Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said.
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Many Iraqi and American officials are convinced that even a modest force would have been able to prevent chaos—not by fighting but by providing training, signals intelligence, and a symbolic presence. “If you had a few hundred here, not even a few thousand, they would be coöperating with you, and they would become your partners,” Askari told me. “But, when they left, all of them left. There’s no one to talk to about anything.”
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“We used to restrain Maliki all the time,” Lieutenant General Michael Barbero, the deputy commander in Iraq until January, 2011, told me. “If Maliki was getting ready to send tanks to confront the Kurds, we would tell him and his officials, ‘We will physically block you from moving if you try to do that.’ ” Barbero was angry at the White House for not pushing harder for an agreement. “You just had this policy vacuum and this apathy,” he said. “Now we have no leverage in Iraq. Without any troops there, we’re just another group of guys.” There is no longer anyone who can serve as a referee, he said, adding, “Everything that has happened there was not just predictable—we predicted it.”
So, after so much American blood and treasure was spent on overthrowing Saddam Hussein and Iraq seemed to be emerging from its decades-long nightmare under Saddam, now it is instead threatening to become yet another failed nation under Iranian control and a potential training ground for extremists. Civil war between Shiites and Sunnis is breaking out and America is powerless to do anything about it. Iraq is falling into the same abyss that Syria has fallen into. All this, because Obama's disastrous "leading from behind," "hitting singles and doubles," toothless "redlines," foreign policy has withdrawn the American forces that would have given him the ability to influence the situation. And then, we are asked to believe that Obama can prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons when, with troops on the ground in Baghdad, he could not even stand up to the Iranian government and prevent it from dictating the shape of the Iraqi government.
It is possible to argue about the wisdom of George Bush's initial decision to invade Iraq. But, once that investment had been made (we are talking about 4500 American lives, after all, and Mr Obama is very fond of talking about investments), to withdraw all troops at the very moment when the investment was beginning to pay dividends is the action of an idiot.
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