The Lies They Spread

Buried inside a story about rising violence in Iraq was this nugget of misinformation:

"The U.S. decision to withdraw its forces from Iraq by the end of 2011 was clearly one factor in al-Qaeda in Iraq's rebound, since it removed a devastatingly effective arrangement of intelligence assets, Special Forces and aerial strike teams," says Michael Knights, a fellow for The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Really. That's a big steaming pile of revisionist right-wing bullshit.

The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq was negotiated with the Iraqi government by the Bush Administration. You might remember that, for when Bush flew to Iraq to sign the agreement, some guy threw his shoes at him. The status of forces agreement stated that all U.S. forces would be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2011.

The agreement was negotiated between two sovereign states. Only a complete imbecile (or a right-wing ideologue) could airily conclude that the U.S. government could airily choose to keep forces there longer.

The fact of the matter was that staying longer would have required another agreement. There were talks about such an agreement, but they broke down because the Iraqi government insisted that the activities of American forces be subject to Iraqi law and Iraqi courts, which have proved to be about as independent from the government as Russian courts. That was a deal-breaker for both sides.

As the 2008 agreement required that all American forces leave Iraq by the end of 2011 and as there was no other agreement to supersede that provision, the troops came home.

To maintain that it was a unilateral decision that could have been reversed by the Obama Administration is a pernicious revision of history.