Yesterday, Donald Trump claimed that President Obama and Hillary Clinton are “co-founders” of ISIS. Not surprisingly, the main stream media jumped on the statement with “fact checks” on how Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi or other former Al Qaeda members in fact “founded” ISIS. Of course, this is a point that the main stream media and the Democrats want to misinterpret. Mr. Trump of course did not mean that President Obama went to Iraq and filed incorporation documents for ISIS, Inc. His broader point, that President Obama’s incompetent foreign policy directly led to the creation and expansion of ISIS is hard to misunderstand or challenge.
Today, we witness the spread of ISIS terror and ISIS refugees across the Middle East, Europe and the United States. President Obama is quick to blame President Bush and the Iraq war for all of this. However, many seem to forget that in 2008, President Obama was handed a stable–albeit shaky–Iraq, which had undergone democratic elections and had working Shia, Sunni and Kurd fractions. In fact, Iraq was stable enough that President Obama, in withdrawing the troops in 2011, declared “victory” and completion of mission. However, President Obama’s hasty exist was despite the warnings by virtually all military commanders, and even President Bush before leaving office, that withdrawing every single US force from Iraq would create the vacuum that today is filled by ISIS, Russia and others. As President Bush had warned in 2007 (also see video at the end of this post):
I know some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq now. To start withdrawing before our commanders tell us would be dangerous, for Iraq, for the region, and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to Al Qaeda. It would mean that we would be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean allowing the terrorists to establish the safe haven in Iraq that they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean increasing the probability that American troops at some point in the future would have to return to confront an enemy that would be even more dangerous.
However, President Obama ignored these realities in order to achieve his ideologically based, anti-war campaign promise. Some claim that President Obama was forced to leave Iraq because the status of forces agreement that was negotiated under President Bush expired in 2011. That is a misleading charge. The status of forces agreement is routinely negotiated on a periodic basis, and then renewed and renegotiated. President Bush had much more resistance from Iraqis than President Obama did to maintaining U.S. presence in Iraq, and yet he had the will to get it done. President Bush engaged on a daily basis with the Iraqi prime minister to ensure a good relationship and continuance of U.S. presence. President Obama, on the other hand, was elected on the promise of ending the Iraq war, and had no interest (and continues to have no interest) in engaging in any war there. His “negotiations” for extension of the status of forces agreement was, at best, a half-hearted discussion with the Iraqis relating to the decision that President Obama had already made, and ran a campaign on, to leave Iraq. (See also, WSJ article on this point)
More regrettably, not only did President Obama create the vacuum that led to ISIS by leaving Iraq, his incompetence following the Iraq withdrawal was just as responsible for where ISIS stands today. Following the Iraqi withdrawal, President Obama presided over a failed “Arab Spring.” The contribution of President Obama and Hillary Clinton to the Arab spring was to overthrow the governments in Libya, Egypt and Syria with no end game. Libya has been handed to ISIS on a silver plate. Syria, despite Obama redlines and statements that Assad must go, has been handed to ISIS, Russia and Iran. Egypt was handed to the Muslim Brotherhood, only to be saved by the patriotic and intelligent Egyptian military. Troublingly, these results were not surprising. Just in 2015, President Obama stated, on more than one occasion, that seven years into his presidency, he still did not have a strategy to deal with ISIS. Later, he implied that he does not even need to have a strategy since ISIS is the equivalent of the “JV team.” He denied for days that the Bengazi attack was a planned terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11. Just a week before ISIS blew up a Russian jetliner, and just a day after ISIS carried out one of the worst terrorist attacks in French history, President Obama claimed that “ISIS was contained.”
Further still, President Obama fostered the situation that forced some U.S. allies in the Middle East to originally finance and empower ISIS. In particular, President Obama’s complete withdrawal from Iraq, which handed that country to the Shia Iran, and other acts of appeasement with Iran, which emboldened Iran to further its terrorist and destabilizing activities around the Middle East in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere in attempts to overthrow the existing governments and install Shia governments, forced the Sunni countries in the Persian Gulf, as well as Turkey, to see the need for a counter balancing force in the likes of ISIS. President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, which will hand more than $100 billion dollars to the world’s premier state sponsor of terror will go a long way in enforcing that calculus.
Islamic extremism terror is not defeated by ideology or delusion, or by putting one’s head in the sands and hoping that the problem will go away. After the surprise attacks of 9/11, President Bush managed to contain Al Qaida and keep the US (and Europe) safe for eight years. Even with all the experience that we now have in fighting terror, few should have confidence that President Obama would manage to keep us safe for eight years under ISIS. In fact, President Obama has done just the opposite. From withdrawing from Iraq despite the advise of all commanders and creating the vacuum that was filled by ISIS, to presiding over a failed Arab spring that further handed Libya and Syria to ISIS, to appeasing the world leading state sponsor of terrorism (Iran) which seeks to destablize the Sunni governments of the region and creates the balancing need of ISIS, to admitting that “we have no strategy to deal with ISIS” seven years into his presidency, to claiming that ISIS is the JV team, to the delusion that “ISIS is contained,” President Obama may not have created ISIS in the technical sense of that word, but he certainly did so in spirit.