Monday, July 22, 2019. The past continues to rebuke Joe Biden.
Next week, the Democratic Party holds their second round of debates for their presidential candidates (on July 30th and July 31st). Right now, one of the 20 who made the cut seems determined to embarrass himself.
Yes, we're talking about War Hawk Joe. Status quo Joe. He voted for the Iraq War. He sold the Iraq War before and after it started. He wants to talk about Iraq . . . provided he can start the conversation after he's Vice President (2009) and end it at the end of 2011. Salvador Rizzo (WASHINGTON POST) fact checks Joe on his Iraq withdrawal claims and comments:
Although Bush set the 2011 withdrawal time frame, the Obama administration had to figure out the logistics and details, and much of that work fell to Biden and his committee. The drawdown proceeded in phases, with U.S. forces dropping from 150,000 to 50,000 to almost zero during Obama’s first term.
However, the United States kept several thousand military contractors in Iraq throughout this time and after 2011. And although Obama promised to end the Iraq War as a candidate, there were bumps along the road that complicate Biden’s neatly wrapped-up story.
Before withdrawing forces in 2011, Obama’s administration tried to persuade Iraqi political leaders to allow a residual force of about 3,500 U.S. troops to remain. Some high-level officials in the Obama administration argued that a total withdrawal would open up a power vacuum in Iraq and erase the gains secured by U.S. forces and international allies.
“It was clear to me — and many others — that withdrawing all our forces would endanger the fragile stability then barely holding Iraq together,” Leon Panetta, who was Obama’s CIA director from 2009 to 2011 and defense secretary from 2011 to 2013, wrote in his memoir, “Worthy Fights.”
In 2011, the United States was seeking legal immunity for U.S. troops as part of an agreement for a continued military presence in Iraq. But there was no support in the Iraqi parliament for that, Biden’s advisers said.
[. . .]
Biden had a big hand in withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq during Obama’s first term. It was a sensitive role and one Biden relished, by many accounts. But he was still the vice president during Obama’s second term, when thousands of U.S. troops returned to the country. It’s puzzling to see him leave that out of his remarks on the campaign trail and in the debate.
The Biden camp argues that these are two very different conflicts and that the troop levels were much higher pre-2011 and much lower post-2014. However, as top Obama administration officials have said in public, the two conflicts are inextricably linked. The Islamic State gained a foothold in Iraq in large part because U.S. forces had withdrawn.
Biden told half the story, so he gets Two Pinocchios.
Two Pinocchios. Liar, liar pants on fire. The Iraq War never ended.