August 12, 2014 1:32 PM

Bearse: Self-Imposed Chaos

From the Right: QR’s conservative columnist Eric Bearse argues that Obama has overreacted to the Bush legacy in such a way that puts the world at risk

Sunni terrorists under the banner of ISIL or ISIS are running around the Iraqi countryside beheading and crucifying men, women and children who don’t renounce their Christian Faith, and currently threatening massacre of our Kurdish Allies in the north. How did we get here, and do you care?

Some would observe that America cannot intervene every time atrocity raises its evil head. I would agree. But America can and should intervene when it created the conditions for such atrocity and when unchecked evil threatens our own existence. In other words, when it is in our national interests to militarily engage the enemy, we must do so.

A series of events led to the rapidly growing threat posed by ISIL fanatics. First, President Obama’s withdrawal of American troops was dictated by his campaign calendar. It was more important to him to say he ended a war than to end a war properly. You can blame President Bush all you want for the initial invasion, but we should not forget that the difficulties of 2006 and 2007 had been largely overcome. America needed to leave a contingency force to ensure a proper long-term transition to the Iraqi Army. It did not.

Now the president is engaging in revisionist history, saying it was an Iraqi decision to not establish a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), enabling a small American presence. So he ended the war, except the Iraqis ended the war. The fact is that he proposed dwindling the American presence from 20,000 troops to 5,000, leaving Malaki with a political problem: asking the Iraqi Parliament to approve a SOFA when the juice wasn’t necessarily worth the squeeze. Yet, today we have sent hundreds of American military advisors to Iraq without the approval of the Iraqi Parliament. It’s all a semantic charade for a President who refuses to admit he botched the withdrawal.

The complete column from Eric Bearse can be found in today's R&D Department.

By Eric Bearse