When you read the title of the editorial: “Who Really Lost
Iraq?” and you read the subtitle: “Leon Panetta says the White House wanted all
U.S. troops out in 2011,” you come to the conclusion that the effect of losing
Iraq (whatever that means) was caused by the withdrawal of American troops from
that country. But this is not what you conclude when reading the evidence that
is given in the text published by the editors of the Wall Street Journal on
October 3, 2014.
Most of the evidence they give are extracts from a
forthcoming memoir written by Leon Panetta who served in the Obama
Administration as CIA director and Secretary of Defense. Having presented the
evidence, the editors say at the end of their piece that “all of this comports
with our own reporting from 2011.” They go further and express their distress
to see “confirmed how much [those] in the White House put their political
desire to withdraw from Iraq
above the U.S.
national interest.”
Well, even though they quote Panetta extensively, they do
not quote a single sentence of what they wrote in 2011 to show how it might
have comported with what Panetta wrote. But that is now beside the point
because what is more important is that they accuse those in the White House of
putting what they call their “political desire” above the U.S. national
interest.
Here is a new beast never heard of before. There is
something called political interest ... but political desire? Political
interest is taken into account when a politician determines that taking a
certain position will help him or her win re-election. But what does political
desire do? Satisfy a politician's desire to be quoted in someone's memoir? Or
is it the desire to be insulted by editors? And can that desire be so strong;
it makes the politician satisfy it at the expense of the “national interest”?
There are no answers to these questions because the goal of
the Wall Street Journal editors was not to shed light on the subject but to use
the Panetta memoir in an attempt to mutilate history, and make it look more
like the image that would serve their own so-called political desires. And who
knows what they mean by that!
So then, let's look at what Panetta said as reported in the
editorial. In doing this, bear in mind that the editors call it “a bombshell
that explains the real reason Americans must fight again in [Iraq ].” Also
bear in mind that they contrast it with what the President told CNN on June 19
... making it sound like the two accounts are different – having stated without
showing how their own account of 2011 comports with that of Panetta.
Here is the Panetta account: “Privately, the various
leadership factions in Iraq
confided they wanted some U.S.
forces to remain as a bulwark against sectarian violence. But none was willing
to take that position publicly, and Prime Minister al-Maliki concluded that any
Status of Forces Agreement would have to be submitted to parliament for
approval.” And the record is to the effect that this never happened.
Here now is the Obama account as reported in the editorial:
“That wasn't a decision made by me. That was a decision made by the Iraqi
government. We offered a modest residual force to help continue to train and
advise Iraqi security forces. We had a core requirement which we require in any
situation where we have U.S.
troops overseas, and that is that they are provided immunity … The Iraqi
government and Prime Minister al-Maliki declined to provide us that immunity.”
This comports with the record, ye at the Wall Street Journal.
And without knowing how much closer to the Panetta account
was the 2011 account of the Wall Street Journal – the way they interpret the
events now – we can only conclude that the current mutilation of history by the
Journal is but a reflection of the intellectual dishonesty they began to
practice as far back as 2011 and before that.
There is one more thing. Panetta wrote history about a time
when the troubles in Iraq
had to do with sectarian violence; something that had been going on for years
without someone calling it “losing Iraq .” This expression came about
when ISIS burst onto the scene and grabbed territory in Iraq . For the
Journal to associate the situation now with an account of what happened then is
like saying America lost the war in Vietnam because the Japanese bombed Pear
Harbor.