Promises Unfulfilled: How a State Department Plan to Stabilize Iraq Broke Apart by Jeff Gerth and Joby Warrick, Washington Post
A week before the last U.S. soldiers left his country in December 2011, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki traveled to Washington to meet the team that would help shape Iraq’s future once the troops and tanks were gone.
Over dinner at the Blair House, guest quarters for elite White House visitors since the 1940s, the dour Iraqi sipped tea while Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke of how her department’s civilian experts could help Iraqis avoid a return to terrorism and sectarian bloodshed.
Iraq would see a “robust civilian presence,” Clinton told reporters afterward, summing up the Obama administration’s pledges to Maliki. “We are working to achieve that,” she said.
Less than three years later, the relatively calm Iraq that Maliki had led in 2011 was gone. The country’s government was in crisis, its U.S.-trained army humiliated, and a third of its territory overrun by fighters from the Islamic State. Meanwhile, State Department programs aimed at helping Iraqis prevent such an outcome had been slashed or curtailed, and some had never materialized at all.
Clinton’s political foes would later seek to blame her, together with President Obama, for the Islamic State’s stunning takeover of western Iraq, saying the State Department failed to preserve fragile security gains achieved at great cost by U.S. troops. In a speech Monday on how he would deal with terrorist threats, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said, “The rise of ISIS is the direct result of policy decisions made by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton.”
But an intensive review of the record during Clinton’s tenure presents a broader picture of missteps and miscalculations by multiple actors — including her State Department as well as the Maliki government, the White House and Congress — that left Iraqi security forces weakened and vulnerable to the Islamic State’s 2014 surge…
Comments
President Obama, much like President Nixon before him, appears to have adopted a grand strategy of "retrenchment."
These such grand strategies accept, I believe, that there will be "costs," for example, the loss of less vital states and societies to one's enemies.
Thus, under President Nixon's retrenchment grand strategy, the Southeast Asian "dominoes" fell -- with South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia joining the communist world.
And, thus, under President Obama retrenchment grand strategy, various Greater Middle Eastern nations may come to be in the hands of our various enemies.
Herein to suggest that, re: the rationale of "retrenchment," these such losses are not to be seen as:
a. Being unanticipated and/or unintended but, rather, as
b. Being what one would (or should) expect re: such a "retrenchment" grand strategy.
(In this regard, to again refer to the Nixon retrenchment grand strategy and the -- understood and anticipated -- [a] potential losses of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and the -- understood and anticipated -- [b] adverse circumstances that might flow therefrom?)
Conclusion:
Should we suggest, therefore, that we, accordingly, not look so much to such things as "How a State Department Plan to Stabilize Iraq Broke Apart" to explain our adverse circumstances today. But, rather, to:
a. A "retrenchment" grand strategy which is knowingly and willing undertaken? And, thus,
b. A grand strategy that anticipates, accepts and embraces such adverse circumstances as we are seen to be dealing with today?
(Herein, the current President believing today -- much as was the case with Nixon and his retrenchment grand strategy back then -- that these such difficulties must be, and ultimately will have to be, addressed primarily by the relevant other "power players" of these regions themselves?)