OBAMA: No “Boots On The Ground” In Iraq, Just 300 “Military Advisors.” Who will, presumably, be wearing sneakers or something. . . .
Related: What Kind Of Iraq Did Obama Inherit? “A fair-minded reading of the facts, I think, shows that when Mr. Obama was sworn in, the Iraq war had more or less been won. Things were fragile to be sure. But the errors that were made during the occupation of Iraq following the fall of Saddam, which were extremely costly, were corrected in 2007. . . . By the time the surge ended in 2008, violence in Iraq had dropped to the lowest level since the first year of the war. Sectarian killings had dropped by 95 percent. By 2009, U.S. combat deaths were extremely rare. (In December of that year there were no American combat deaths in Iraq.) Iraq was on the mend. Even Barack Obama, who opposed the surge every step of the way, conceded in September 2008 that it had succeeded in reducing violence ‘beyond our wildest dreams.'” Joe Biden was calling it a “great achievement” for the Obama/Biden Administration in 2010. But then Obama screwed up in Libya and, especially, Syria and it all went to hell.