who shares a last name and a foreign policy team with former president george w. bush. they wouldn t have invaded iraq knowing what we know now. the brothers administration including some of those same advisers were duped into a war your reaction to the sort of arc of the trajectory of the argument over knowing what we know now, and jeb bush s attempt to pivot to the question of what was done in 2009? well, i would be delighted to hear what mr. bush proposes we do in the future, since that s what he wants to talk about. i think he ignores if you want to go back to 2009, the fact that it was george bush who negotiated the withdrawal of american troops. which i think was a good thing to do at that time. and it was prime minister maliki who decided he would go ahead and honor that agreement, that the united states would leave in 2011. what is jeb bush going to do? what are the republicans going
much they are like each other. are they all suiting up for the clown car? eugene robinson is a pulitzer prize winning columnist with the washington post and j.p. becker. when president obama was asked if we were losing and he said no, i don t think we re losing and i just talked to our centcom commanders and the folks on the ground we re eight months into what we ve always thought would be a multi-year campaign and today hillary clinton threw her weight behind the commander in chief. i basically agree with the policy that we are currently following, and that is american air support is available. american intelligence and surveillance is available. american trainers are trying to undo the damage that was done to the iraqi army by former prime minister maliki. this has to be fought by and won by iraqis.
what leverage does the u.s. have and the secretary have and the white house have over nuri al maliki and the current iraqi government? i mean, form a new government or else what? well, they have to form a new government by law. they had an election and that process is playing out. but i think what you ve seen the president and the secretary say is we are going to stand by iraq and we re going to increase our assistance to iraq. we re going to give them more intelligence, more surveillance, more munitions. 300 military advisers, special forces guys who know how to fight isil. but as we do so, their leaders need to step up. we have been crystal clear about that. whether it s prime minister maliki, or anyone else, and that our assistance is going to be conditioned on them stepping up. the 300 military advisers the u.s. has announced it s sending to iraq, there s been a little bit of contradictory reports or at least ambiguous ones about the degree to which they have legal immunity.
empire. they also haven t been through the west failure system where most of europe went from being a religious based society to a capital based society. there are two issues here which i see very important for the west to really understand. one is regional and one is local or with respect to iraq. i ll come to your question in a second. the first is locally you ve got a prime minister maliki who has been supremely devicive in the way he s governed. he sentenced his vice president to death in september 2012. that s going to create even more frictions. security-wise, the west is going to get its head around, that it can t go into a country and can t invade a country, take out the army, take out the police, and then invest in new security infrastructures without there being significant ramifications. u.s. is the most powerful army and military in the world.
grievances against the central government there which they perceive as not ruling in their interests. frankly, there s also disputes between the kurds in baghdad as we ve seen in recent days over thing like the regional the power of the regions and oil exports and things like that. and so what we see is that after u.s. troops withdrew in december of 2011, immediately all these sectarian tensions came to the fore, and frankly, a lot of that responsibility, i think, we would place at the doorstep of prime minister maliki and the way that he s ruled since then. exactl at the doorstep of prime minister nuri al maliki. but to suggest without even looking at any of the facts on the ground, i would hope, or maybe ignoring them and twisting them for your own political benefit, what really has happened here is had we left in 2011, the sectarian differences would have displayed themselves, as has been predicted since day one of this war. had we left in 2025, these differences because this