One of President Obama’s top national security advisers defended the administration’s strategy for fighting the Islamic State on Wednesday and said it was the fault of the Iraqi government and people — not the White House — that no U.S. troops were left in the country to help with security after the 2011 pullout of American forces.
The White House “sought to leave a limited residual force” in Iraq, but the Iraqi government simply refused to agree to legal protections for such troops, said Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken, who argued the final decision to withdraw all U.S. troops “was not the result of a failure to negotiate.”
“It’s something we worked very hard,” he said. “But … after a 10-year ’occupation,’ the Iraqi body politic did not want us to stay in Iraq. That’s what happened.”
But critics, including such administration insiders as former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, have argued that Mr. Obama did not press hard enough for a deal in his desire to wind up the U.S. military mission in Iraq, and that a deal could have been struck.
Mr. Blinken said in a rare public briefing at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that Iraqi officials continued to brush off Obama administration attempts in 2012 to contain the threat posed by al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) — the group from which the Islamic State eventually emerged.
“The Iraqis in early 2012 told us they were confident they could handle the problem,” Mr. Blinken said. “We said, ’You’re wrong. If you don’t constantly and proactively go at AQI, they will rise up again.’”
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Mr. Blinken contended that Mr. Obama acted “decisively” and “deliberately” to respond after this year’s surge by the Islamic State. The extremist group, also known by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL, began seizing a vast swath of territory spanning the border between northern Iraq and Syria in June.
The White House has since led the formation of a coalition of international powers, including several of Iraq’s neighbors, to conduct airstrikes against Islamic State targets in both Syria and Iraq.
While Mr. Blinken said Wednesday that the next stage of the strategy will require ground forces, he gave no indication that the White House seeks to expand the roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel recently deployed to Iraq to act as advisers and trainers for the Iraqi military — which largely collapsed in the face of the extremists’ surge earlier this year.
“The coalition can do real damage to ISIL through the air, but without forces on the ground to hold territory from which ISIL has been removed, we will not be able to shrink and eventually eliminate the safe haven,” he said.
The administration hopes those ground forces will include soon-to-be retrained elements of the Iraqi military, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Syrian moderate opposition rebels and a newly formed Iraqi national guard forces composed primarily of Sunni Muslim tribal forces.
“The Iraqis don’t need and indeed they don’t want foreign forces in combat in Iraq,” said Mr. Blinken. “…We will not fall into the trap that ISIL would want us to set, of drawing us in in large numbers, bogging us down and bleeding us.”
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While he acknowledged that the current strategy will be “difficult, challenging and time-consuming,” Mr. Blinken said the coalition strategy can succeed with the backing of the U.S.-led aerial bombing campaign.
“As the Iraqis start, piece by piece, to go after them, ISIL will have to make a choice,” he said. “It will have to stand and fight and so be very visible to the coalition and our air power, it will have to flee, or it will hunker down and instead of the Iraqis being besieged by ISIL, ISIL will be under siege from the Iraqis.”
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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