Obama Snatched Ramadi Defeat from Bush Victory

By Daniel John Sobieski

The White House description of the fall of Ramadi to ISIS forces we have supposedly been busy degrading and destroying as a “setback” is like the British calling Dunkirk in World War II a strategic withdrawal. Ramadi is a defeat, the result of the precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by President Obama against the advice of military minds who know better about these things than the former community organizer from Illinois.

It is a defeat for President Obama’s foreign policy, a rebuke of his fundamental transformation of America’s role in the world from a leader who shaped events to one of treating foreign affairs as a spectator sport, with the U.S. “leading from behind” and being left behind in the process.

Critics of our role in Iraq offer the chaos in Iraq as a rebuke of President George W. Bush’s decision to topple the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, a regime that had used weapons of mass destruction against Iran in its war with its equally belligerent neighbor, and which had used these weapons against its own people at Halabja. The successful defeat of Saddam Hussein and liberation of Iraq was done at great expense in lives and treasure.

Read more: American Thinker