The President’s circle of jerks in the press are so invested in protecting their precious that they will not cover this extensively. In fact, I am absolutely shocked that NPR has interviewed Dexter Filkins and likewise shocked that the New Yorker would run Filkins’ expose on how Barack Obama lost Iraq and let it be turned into an Iranian colony.
It is stunning and the bulk of the press corps will no doubt declare that it is now sufficiently covered that the rest of them can ignore it. Making a long, detailed report short, Dexter Filkins provides a detailed report on how privately the Iraqis were begging the U.S. to keep some troops in Iraq. More so, the President and his advisors knew Iran was swarming into Iraq. Instead of staying, the President decided to let Iran fill the American void.
Over at the Daily Caller, Matt Lewis provides a synopsis of Filkins’ interview tin Terry Gross at NPR.
In part, Filkins told Gross
What the senior American military commanders told me was that every single senior political leader, no matter what party or what group, including Maliki, said to them privately, we want you to stay. We don’t want you to fight. We don’t want combat troops. We don’t want Americans getting killed, but we want 10,000 American troops inside the Green Zone training our army, giving us intelligence, playing that crucial role as the broker and interlocutor that makes our system work.
In Filkins’ actual piece, there is this horrifying bit:
At a meeting of the National Security Council a month later, the White House signed off on the new regime. Officials who had spent much of the previous decade trying to secure American interests in the country were outraged. “We lost four thousand five hundred Americans only to let the Iranians dictate the outcome of the war? To result in strategic defeat?” the former American diplomat told me. “F*ck that.” At least one U.S. diplomat in Baghdad resigned in protest. And Ayad Allawi, the secular Iraqi leader who captured the most votes, was deeply embittered. “I needed American support,” he told me last summer. “But they wanted to leave, and they handed the country to the Iranians. Iraq is a failed state now, an Iranian colony.”
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