Dexter Filkins again on Obama's disastrous abandonment of Iraq

In an earlier blog post, I quoted extensively from a recent piece by Dexter Filkins in which he described the growing sectarian violence in Iraq and how it had come about as a result of Obama's decision to withdraw all American troops from the country. Filkins has now published a shorter, follow-up piece in which he repeats his analysis. Again, it is worth quoting extensively:

When the Americans invaded, in March, 2003, they destroyed the Iraqi state—its military, its bureaucracy, its police force, and most everything else that might hold a country together. They spent the next nine years trying to build a state to replace the one they crushed. By 2011, by any reasonable measure, the Americans had made a lot of headway but were not finished with the job. For many months, the Obama and Maliki governments talked about keeping a residual force of American troops in Iraq, who would act largely to train Iraq’s Army and to provide intelligence against Sunni insurgents. (They would almost certainly have been barred from fighting.) Those were important reasons to stay, but the most important went largely unstated: it was to continue to act as a restraint on Maliki’s sectarian impulses, at least until the Iraqi political system was strong enough to contain him on its own. The negotiations between Obama and Maliki fell apart, in no small measure because of a lack of engagement by the White House. Today, many Iraqis, including some close to Maliki, say that a small force of American soldiers—working in non-combat roles—would have provided a crucial stabilizing factor that is now missing from Iraq. Sami al-Askari, a Maliki confidant, told me for my article this spring, “If you had a few hundred here, not even a few thousand, they would be coöperating with you, and they would become your partners.” President Obama wanted the Americans to come home, and Maliki didn’t particularly want them to stay.

In other words, the transformation of an enormous swath of the Middle East, spanning both Syria and Iraq, into a battlefield between Shiites and Sunnis can be traced directly to Obama's decision to withdraw the stabilizing influence of American troops from the Middle East. And Obama has promised us that he will pursue the same misguided policy of withdrawal from Afghanistan. What a disaster!