[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
By the way, Bush had since May 20, 2006 to deal with Maliki on the future of the American forces that Bush put in Iraq. And he didn’t deliver.[/quote]
2006 was the height of the insurgency…[/quote]
All the more reason to secure your troops’ mandate into the future.
Anyway, the facts are that Bush and Obama spent an almost identical amount of time trying to win the concession of a remnant security force, and both failed to do it.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
So–Bush starts negotiations 9 months before he’s going to run out of time, and then he runs out of time: Hip hip hurray for Bush.
[/quote]
Bush started three years and nine months before the proposed withdrawal. Obama then did nothing for the next two and a half years. Therein lies the difference.
[/quote]
The withdrawal was created in the negotiations. Bush didn’t start negotiating three years before it–he set it, after starting. And in setting it, he also signed his name to the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces. Because he failed to get anything better. Not because he ran out of time–he had years to try to fix the mess he made in Iraq. Not because he just couldn’t–he had the same opportunity as had Obama. He just failed. Just like Obama.[/quote]
As I said, you don’t start negotiating a withdrawal at the height of the war before the end is in sight. Bush started the negotiations at the appropriate time. Obama failed to continue them until the eleventh hour.
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
It’s apparent that Obama didn’t try to apply pressure. He left it to the last minute then went through a charade. He wanted out. Everything points to that. The fact that Bush ran out of time is immaterial to Obama’s subsequent handling of the situation.[/quote]
You are making ridiculous excuses. I have already refuted the timing thing. Bush negotiated for 9 1/4 months at most, whereas Obama negotiated for 7 at least, and he began at Bush’s sticking point. I.e., he had a hell of a lot less to get through before coming to the point of contention between Maliki and the U.S.
They both tried, they both failed. But somehow, one of them couldn’t help it, whereas the other could? I don’t think so.
Edit: And what you wrote above does not constitute evidence. It’s a guy’s interpretation of some things. I’m taking about what can be proved, and what cannot be proved, in debate.[/quote]
Herein lies the difference: Bush signed because he ran out of time in respect to his term of office - he passed the ball to Obama. Obama should have continued the process immediately. He had three years to negotiate terms but left it to halfway through 2011.[/quote]
Diplomacy isn’t a continuous, unbroken process. Negotiations broke down in 2008. It’s not unordinary in diplomatic history that it took roughly 3 year for the parties to return to the bargaining table. In fact, 3 years is a relatively short amount of time for such a security agreement to come back onto the agenda.
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
It’s apparent that Obama didn’t try to apply pressure. He left it to the last minute then went through a charade. He wanted out. Everything points to that. The fact that Bush ran out of time is immaterial to Obama’s subsequent handling of the situation.[/quote]
You are making ridiculous excuses. I have already refuted the timing thing. Bush negotiated for 9 1/4 months at most, whereas Obama negotiated for 7 at least, and he began at Bush’s sticking point. I.e., he had a hell of a lot less to get through before coming to the point of contention between Maliki and the U.S.
They both tried, they both failed. But somehow, one of them couldn’t help it, whereas the other could? I don’t think so.
Edit: And what you wrote above does not constitute evidence. It’s a guy’s interpretation of some things. I’m taking about what can be proved, and what cannot be proved, in debate.[/quote]
Herein lies the difference: Bush signed because he ran out of time in respect to his term of office - he passed the ball to Obama. Obama should have continued the process immediately. He had three years to negotiate terms but left it to halfway through 2011.[/quote]
Diplomacy isn’t a continuous, unbroken process. Negotiations broke down in 2008. It’s not unordinary in diplomatic history that it took roughly 3 year for the parties to return to the bargaining table. In fact, 3 years is a relatively short amount of time for such a security agreement to come back onto the agenda.
[/quote]
It wasn’t on Obama’s agenda and it should have been.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Gentlemen, at this point, does it really matter whether the Scarecrow or the Cowardly Lion deserves more blame for the rapid irruptions of flying monkeys?
[/quote]
Yes! There is pride at stake here.
Joking aside, it doesn’t really matter in most ways. But to an extent, it does. What I see in this thread is the inability of extremely intelligent people to overcome the ad-hoc foolishness forced upon them by their biases. What I see is the disingenuous defense of a man clearly deserving of blame because, well, there is this other guy and he made the same mistake and if we acknowledge for a second this fact then we’ll have contributed to the greatest evil of our time, which is praise of Barack Obama.
Never mind that nobody is coming remotely close to praising Barack Obama.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Gentlemen, at this point, does it really matter whether the Scarecrow or the Cowardly Lion deserves more blame for the rapid irruptions of flying monkeys?
Meanwhile, Vlad Putin called up Maliki to say “don’t worry, Comrade, Russia’s got your back”, while Iran snidely remarked that the U.S. just doesn’t have the sack to deal with the problem.
I’m paraphrasing, of course.
Looks like a jolly good proxy war. The headhunters versus the nuclear goons.
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
It wasn’t on Obama’s agenda and it should have been.
[/quote]
So Bush and Obama spend an almost exactly comparable amount of time pushing for the same thing, and they both fail to win the concession they need, but for only one of them is there a problem of priority and agenda.
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
(Sigh)[/quote]
You and me both, brother.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
It wasn’t on Obama’s agenda and it should have been.
[/quote]
So Bush and Obama spend an almost exactly comparable amount of time pushing for the same thing, and they both fail to win the concession they need, but for only one of them is there a problem of priority and agenda.[/quote]
It’s a question of how much time they had. 2006 was the height of the insurgency. 2007, Bush was bringing more troops into Iraq as part of the surge. He’s hardly going to start deciding on withdrawal plans during a surge. He began negotiations the following year at the appropriate time as the surge began to take effect and things started to quieten down. He had less than a year to work on it. Anyway, it seems we aren’t going to agree on this so I say we take varq’s advice.
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
It wasn’t on Obama’s agenda and it should have been.
[/quote]
So Bush and Obama spend an almost exactly comparable amount of time pushing for the same thing, and they both fail to win the concession they need, but for only one of them is there a problem of priority and agenda.[/quote]
It’s a question of how much time they had. 2006 was the height of the insurgency. 2007, Bush was bringing more troops into Iraq as part of the surge. He’s hardly going to start deciding on withdrawal plans during a surge. He began negotiations the following year at the appropriate time as the surge began to take effect and things started to quieten down. He had less than a year to work on it. Anyway, it seems we aren’t going to agree on this so I say we take varq’s advice.[/quote]
Well, I’m going to surprise you and offer a qualified agreement.
Events were compressed in Iraq through the end of Bush’s presidency. The “situation” flared hard in the early-middle of his second term, and he had a lot on his hands.
However, this doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t have been pushing hard to iron out a stable future for the army he put in the country he invaded. It was his chief responsibility. That he and his administration were blindsided and derailed in Iraq again and again and again because of their own miscalculations does not constitute a great excuse for his inability to deliver a SOFA with the provisions necessary to secure the situation he himself created.
Is it understandable that Bush couldn’t get it done? Yeah, I think it is. Does this change the fact that he didn’t do it? Not at all. Was it impossible for Bush to have gotten it done? No (and if it was, then it was certainly impossible for Obama as well, because if the Iraqis were so intransigent as to withstand a year of Bush’s best efforts and still not concede immunity for U.S. soldiers, then it’s highly unlikely, given how diplomacy tends to work in hot-and-cool periods, that Obama had a remote chance in 2009-10).
This doesn’t excuse Obama for not having won the necessary struggle, and, though there’s no guarantee that more time would have meant a different result, it doesn’t excuse Obama for not having moved sooner. It just adds a dose of reality to our conception of how we got here: We got here because a president invaded Iraq and then signed an agreement without the provision he needed, and then another president failed to re-negotiate the said agreement to include the said provision. If either president had delivered what was necessary, this mess would not be happening*. And either could have (or neither could have).
*This mess would also not be happening if Bush hadn’t invaded the damn country in the first place. But that’s a story for a different day.
It’s Chester Alan Arthur’s fault.
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
It’s Chester Alan Arthur’s fault.[/quote]
I still say Lowell Thomas has a lot to answer for.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I still say Lowell Thomas has a lot to answer for.[/quote]
And in the unlikely event that anyone doesn’t catch the reference…
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/762184/posts?page=1
SexMachine, I imagine you in particular getting a kick out of this.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I still say Lowell Thomas has a lot to answer for.[/quote]
And in the unlikely event that anyone doesn’t catch the reference…
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/762184/posts?page=1
SexMachine, I imagine you in particular getting a kick out of this.[/quote]
It’s a shame Lawrence’s distant cousin Orde Wingate didn’t get the same publicity.
“The vanity of the principals plus a great amount of romantic dust has been allowed so far to obscure what really did happen. A ragged horde of at most a few thousand and often only a few hundred Bedouin, paid in gold for approximately two days’ fighting per month… caused the Turks a certain amount of embarrassment and anxiety. . . . In return for the highly paid assistance of this small rabble of Hedjazi Bedouin, we have handed over to the “Arabs” the whole of Saudi Arabia, and the Yemen, Iraq, Trans-Jordan and Syria. A more absurd transaction has seldom been seen.”
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Just for the sake of accuracy, this is what I came in to refute:
[quote]pat wrote:
Obama really, seriously fucked up this time. The pull out was his idea and it has blown up in his face. [/quote]
Since Pat wrote this, we have learned that:
Bush tried to negotiate a remnant security force, failed, and signed an agreement prescribing a complete withdrawal by December 2011.
Obama, in a bid to re-negotiate Bush’s agreement with the addition of a remnant security force (as Bush had originally wanted), discussed with Maliki in the summer of 2011 an agreement of up to 10,000 and as few 3,500 American troops. Exactly as Bush had, Obama failed, and we followed the withdrawal timeline signed in Bush’s SOFA–a timeline that both Bush and Obama offered to nix in favor of a provision for a stay-behind force that would have had direct impact on Iraq’s current situation.
Unless somebody can prove that any of this was misreported–by AP, by the NYT, by the WSJ, by the WashPost, by the National Journal, by Huffpo, by Reuters, by AFP–or that there is some evidence, of which the rest of us are not aware, proving that it was Obama’s plan not to supply the troops he offered to Maliki in 2011, my work here is done.[/quote]
Again:
His idea, his fuck up. He says so…
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Just for the sake of accuracy, this is what I came in to refute:
[quote]pat wrote:
Obama really, seriously fucked up this time. The pull out was his idea and it has blown up in his face. [/quote]
Since Pat wrote this, we have learned that:
Bush tried to negotiate a remnant security force, failed, and signed an agreement prescribing a complete withdrawal by December 2011.
Obama, in a bid to re-negotiate Bush’s agreement with the addition of a remnant security force (as Bush had originally wanted), discussed with Maliki in the summer of 2011 an agreement of up to 10,000 and as few 3,500 American troops. Exactly as Bush had, Obama failed, and we followed the withdrawal timeline signed in Bush’s SOFA–a timeline that both Bush and Obama offered to nix in favor of a provision for a stay-behind force that would have had direct impact on Iraq’s current situation.
Unless somebody can prove that any of this was misreported–by AP, by the NYT, by the WSJ, by the WashPost, by the National Journal, by Huffpo, by Reuters, by AFP–or that there is some evidence, of which the rest of us are not aware, proving that it was Obama’s plan not to supply the troops he offered to Maliki in 2011, my work here is done.[/quote]
Again:
His idea, his fuck up. He says so…[/quote]
Yes , pat, you got it:
“In todayâ??s conversation, Prime Minister Maliki and I agreed that a meeting of the Higher Coordinating Committee of the Strategic Framework Agreement will convene in the coming weeks. And I invited the Prime Minister to come to the White House in December, as we plan for all the important work that we have to do together. This will be a strong and enduring partnership. With our diplomats and civilian advisors in the lead, weâ??ll help Iraqis strengthen institutions that are just, representative and accountable. Weâ??ll build new ties of trade and of commerce, culture and education, that unleash the potential of the Iraqi people. Weâ??ll partner with an Iraq that contributes to regional security and peace, just as we insist that other nations respect Iraqâ??s sovereignty.”
Bush negotiated the SOFA over 2 years. He negotiated the SFA. The troop deployments were an open question. He negotiated 2 completed treaties–while he was a lame duck president.
The details were handed off to Obama, who was quick to claim his success in ending the war. Obama negotiated no successful pact in the next 3 years. He didn’t even try for 2 years and 10 months.
Was Maliki an asshole? Yes, equally so for each, but Maliki had an advantage knowing Bush was gone after Dec 2008. And still agreements and frameworks happened. Obama had an advantage over Maliki, a new president with an undivided Congress and unified public opinion after 2009–squandered.
So why does smh among others not recognize this as a failure? The ensuing events were foreseen by several responsible officers in his cabinet and in the Joint Chiefs–in his own administration.
This is not partisanship on my part, it is a recognition of responsibility. If the President is not responsible for the unfolding events–out of intentional blindness to the facts, out of a need to be perceived as the great peacemaker–than who is responsible? Not Chester Alan Arthur, not Sykes and Picot.
Where is this heading?
(Some readers may not care for the source. Tough.)
Mr Kerry has announced now that Iran and the U.S. have “shared interests” in Iraq. Nothing could be stupider. The mullahs in Teheran see no coherent state to their west, just the fabrication of infidel British diplomats in collusion with Sunni rejects after WWI. A temporary problem for them, soon to be solved after centuries of struggle. Iran has no interest in maintaining a unified Iraq, even with that scum Maliki in charge.
But Mr. Obama’s minions are nevertheless ready to turn a great turn, and “lean” toward Iran, for the appearance of short term gains. They are mistaken, as they forsake every other ally and commitment in the region. This is being done not out of strategic benefit for the U.S., but out of abject desperation.
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Just for the sake of accuracy, this is what I came in to refute:
[quote]pat wrote:
Obama really, seriously fucked up this time. The pull out was his idea and it has blown up in his face. [/quote]
Since Pat wrote this, we have learned that:
Bush tried to negotiate a remnant security force, failed, and signed an agreement prescribing a complete withdrawal by December 2011.
Obama, in a bid to re-negotiate Bush’s agreement with the addition of a remnant security force (as Bush had originally wanted), discussed with Maliki in the summer of 2011 an agreement of up to 10,000 and as few 3,500 American troops. Exactly as Bush had, Obama failed, and we followed the withdrawal timeline signed in Bush’s SOFA–a timeline that both Bush and Obama offered to nix in favor of a provision for a stay-behind force that would have had direct impact on Iraq’s current situation.
Unless somebody can prove that any of this was misreported–by AP, by the NYT, by the WSJ, by the WashPost, by the National Journal, by Huffpo, by Reuters, by AFP–or that there is some evidence, of which the rest of us are not aware, proving that it was Obama’s plan not to supply the troops he offered to Maliki in 2011, my work here is done.[/quote]
Again:
His idea, his fuck up. He says so…[/quote]
I’ve dismantled this point a dozen times now. It seems to me that you didn’t have the facts when you wrote that this was all Obama’s idea, oh how it’s blown up on him. You didn’t know that Bush had tried and failed to win the provision of a security force. You didn’t know that Bush had signed an agreement prescribing a complete withdrawal by December 2011 because he failed to get the SOFA that he needed to get. You didn’t know that Obama had tried to renegotiate that same agreement, to win the provision of that same American troop presence, and, just like Bush, had failed. You couldn’t have called the whole thing Obama’s idea if you’d known that he’d tried for the same thing Bush had tried for and was denied by Maliki as Bush had been. You didn’t know that, at the time of the withdrawal, conservative media made the point that, despite Obama’s rhetoric, the withdrawal was a loss for him, because he’d wanted to do different and he’d failed. You didn’t know all of this.
Which is fine. What’s not fine is that now you do know these things–unless you’re literally ignoring the evidence–and, instead of adjusting your opinions in order to align them with reality, you’re doubling down on the above folly [u]which relies on the ludicrous implication that “Obama said X” is a valid and sufficient argument in favor of X’s truth. Indeed, it’s even superior to documentation in the hierarchy of evidence.[/u]
Just how bad is this line of reasoning? Well, let’s see.
So:
–If you like your health insurance, you can keep it.
–Obamacare is good for the middle class, and it’s fiscally responsible.
–It’s giving the American people economic security, and that’s something to be proud of.
–It’s working.
–It’s helping people everywhere.
–And, last but not least, critics of the law are mad at the idea of folks having health insurance.
Well then, I guess that’s settled, yeah*?
*Posted in the Obamacare thread for good measure
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
Bush negotiated the SOFA over 2 years.[/quote]
I have proved this false. I would suggest that it behooves you to either refute the timeline I evidenced, or adopt it.
[quote]
He negotiated the SFA. The troop deployments were an open question.[/quote]
Were they? The SFA subordinated itself to the SOFA, stipulating that it was to be implemented “pursuant to” the latter. And the latter read, in part: We’ll leave to the last man in December 2011. Signed, the United States.
I had no idea that open questions could appear so closed. Or is it instead that Bush failed to get what he needed and signed a bad agreement? He kicked the can to Obama, who then committed the same sin of failure, with the substitution of the words “abode by” for “signed.”
