Did you see Iranian reaction to their diplomat shaking hands with Obama?

SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL, no, and it never was realistic to expect a different outcome. Consider who we are dealing with and then factor in the weakest president we have had in modern times.

Capt Seid Waddell Roger that!

The deal is a horrible joke…. 28days notice to inspect their non military facilities….. This was put together so they can build a bomb.

SN Greg Wright, it is hard for me to find the grown adults on either side of this issue.

Cpl Chris Rice, that would be a double-whammy.

COL Ted Mc, sir, we WERE greeted as liberators when we first went in. Our problems began because the Turks refused to let our 4th ID cross their territory to act as the northern part of the pincer operation to trap the RG and destroy them when they still had the will to fight. As a result they threw off their uniforms and melted into the population to form the resistance and try to stir up a Sunni-Shia civil war.

And the inclusive civil government we were helping to get underway was a new thing with which none of the people in the area had any experience. You will recall that the Sunnis boycotted the first election and found that this left them powerless. The Shia government (under our urging) brought them into the government anyway, and the Sunnis participated in later elections. The Sunnis also joined with us to defeat AQI, and the government was beginning to stabilize well. Even the Obama administration was trying to take credit for the peaceful, inclusive government that had developed in Iraq.

The pro-Iranian revenge cleansing of the Sunnis did not take place until Obama abandoned the effort by pulling all of our forces out while the successes there were still fragile. Without U.S. support the Iraqis had to turn to the greatest power in the neighborhood - Iran.

This was predicted by many high ranking military and State Dept. leaders - but Obama's ideology blinded him from seeing what everyone else in the area knew - all he cared about was extracting our forces from the area. Obama apparently believes that the world's problems are due to American interference, and he is determined to end that.

And Bush's vision was a peaceful democratic Iraq with an American military presence to provide a stabilizing influence in the ME.

With all due respect, it appears to me that your ideology is also distorting your view of the history of the conflict.

Capt Seid Waddell - Captain; And were the Iraqis STILL treating the US forces as liberators when Mr. Bush's term of office expired so that it was all Mr. Obama's fault that the Iraqis wanted the US forces out of Iraq?

I will, however, agree with you that BOTH Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama were trying to take the credit for a "peaceful, inclusive, government in Iraq". That there simply wasn't one doesn't detract from the fact that they both CLAIMED that there was one.

You appear to have forgotten what gave al-Qa'eda its first foothold in Iraq and that was the Shi'ite "revenge killings" of Sunni. That al-Qa'eda went too far and ticked the Sunni off really wasn't something that anyone can give Mr. Bush credit for - although he does get the credit for fairly successful efforts in the "Rent-A-Friend" field.

If Mr. Bush had a vision of "a peaceful democratic Iraq with an American military presence to provide a stabilizing influence in the ME" he most certainly didn't do very much to actually achieve it. Of course Mr. Bush's "plan" (as reported by General Wesley Clark in his book "Winning Modern Wars" - Public Affairs (September 30, 2004), ISBN-10: [login to see] ("As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.") doesn't appear to have gotten very far.

But I suppose that that's all Mr. Obama's fault too.

Face it, if Mr. Bush had a "vision", then he didn't have a plan to actually achieve it. If he had actually had a plan then Iraq wouldn't have collapsed internally and there would not have been a corrupt and ineffective pro-Iranian government installed as a "friend of America".

Of course to actually achieve any of the stuff that SHOULD have been planned for would have entailed actual preparation and the assignment of people who actually knew what they were doing, knew what they actually wanted to accomplish, had actual concrete and measurable goals to meet, actually understood the local culture, actually accepted that the local population was going to be running a government of Iraqis, by Iraqis, and for Iraqis, and could actually communicate with the locals.

There were next to no plans for "civil affairs teams" to go to Iraq after the invasion - despite Mr. Bush being told that they were needed. The US military was not trained to provide the needed civilian control assistance (and was, in many cases, directly ordered not to do so.) The total dismantling of the Iraqi civil service, educational system, and medical system by an arbitrary fiat of the American government appointed ruler of Iraq did very little to actually improve the situation for the average Iraqi and the US government took no effective steps to replace those people in a timely manner. Of course making the entire Iraqi military into unemployed unemployables REALLY helped the economic and governmental situations in Iraq. NONE of those can be laid at the feet of Mr. Obama.

I do believe that Mr. Bush sincerely wanted to improve the situation in Iraq - but the fact is that he didn't. And he didn't simply because he did not have the faintest idea what he was doing other than "getting Saddam Hussein". And he didn't have the faintest idea what he was doing because he didn't actually listen to the people who actually knew what was happening. And he didn't actually listen to the peopple who knew what was going on because they weren't telling him what he wanted to hear. And he didn't want to hear what he didn't want to hear because if he had listened to that he would have known that what he wanted to do to improve the situation in Iraq simply wasn't going to work.

Mr. Bush's intentions were fine. His execution sucked.

COL Ted Mc, Mr. Bush did have a plan and it was working until Obama kicked the supports out from under it.

Capt Seid Waddell - Captain; I respect your belief. Unfortunately it isn't supported by any of the reports/analysis on what happened in Iraq that weren't written by extreme apologists for Mr. Bush.

If you stick with "Mr. Bush had a GOAL." I'll agree with you.

Unfortunately a GOAL is NOT a PLAN and the facts of the matter prove that there was nothing that would pass muster at even the junior staff level as a "plan" either in place or developed for how to achieve the GOAL. The administration of Iraq was ad hoc, improvised, conducted by untrained personnel, chaotic, riddled with corruption, arbitrary, unreliable, and ineffectual. If that is what you meant by "Mr. Bush had a plan and it was working well ..." please tell me so and I will agree with you.

If not, then I'll stick with "Mr. Bush had a GOAL but simply didn't know how to achieve it.".

SSgt Alex Robinson, only those of us that believed them in the first place.