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Obama’s Secretary of Defense/CIA Director: Rise of ISIS is Obama’s Fault
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 2, 2014 @ 11:15 am In The Point | 17 Comments
You know that things are bad when a Clinton loyalist who was rewarded with heading up Defense and the CIA is running to sell you out.
Obama’s former Secretary of Defense and Director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, has blamed the president for the chaos unfolding in Iraq.
Time previewed Panetta’s upcoming memoir, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace. In the book, Panetta said he and others in the Obama administration pushed for a residual force of U.S. troops to remain in Iraq but their efforts were stymied by White House.
“The White House was so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests,” Panetta wrote…
My fear, as I voiced to the President and others, was that if the country split apart or slid back into the violence that we’d seen in the years immediately following the U.S. invasion, it could become a new haven for terrorists to plot attacks against the U.S. Iraq’s stability was not only in Iraq’s interest but also in ours. I privately and publicly advocated for a residual force that could provide training and security for Iraq’s military.
To my frustration, the White House coordinated the negotiations but never really led them. Officials there seemed content to endorse an agreement if State and Defense could reach one, but without the President’s active advocacy, al-Maliki was allowed to slip away. The deal never materialized. To this day, I believe that a small U.S. troop presence in Iraq could have effectively advised the Iraqi military on how to deal with al-Qaeda’s resurgence and the sectarian violence that has engulfed the country.
This isn’t new. This version of events was well known. I wrote about it a few years ago in The Great Betrayal. But it was limited mainly to conservative critics.
Now Panetta, whose people were obviously the source of the leaks of that version of events, is openly putting it out in his memoirs. And it couldn’t come at a worse possible time for Obama.
Panetta is rushing to excuse his own role and prevent himself from becoming a scapegoat for Obama’s latest “intelligence failure”.
But it can also be seen as Hillary Clinton ramming a knife in Obama’s back and kicking him out on the way down. The last thing that Obama needed now was his own top defense figure coming out and saying that the rise of ISIS could have been prevented if he had the country’s interests at heart, instead of his own political agenda.
Panetta is saying that Obama did not want to be associated with any agreement. He wanted the buck passed to the military. The military was tired of the buck. The White House’s message to Iraq was that it didn’t want to be involved. The message was received.
Maliki climbed all the way into bed with Iran and the rest is well… current events.
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