Drawing lessons from Iraq.
'America will pay a high price for defeat in Iraq. Our global credibility is seriously damagedâ??it is surely no accident that the weekend after President Obama announced that we were abandoning Iraq, President Hamid Karzai said that Afghanistan would stand with Pakistan against a U.S. attack. Why not? The Iranian and Pakistani narratives all along have been that the Americans will ultimately abandon their allies to their fate, while the neighbors will be around to exact revenge. President Obama has just reinforced that narrative before all the world. - Frederick Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Marisa Sullivan'
This "narrative" is based on geography and despite the fulminations of our pundit class, geography is what it is. It is very difficult - not to mention costly - to sustain forward deployed garrisons in hostile countries. The lesson various countries no doubt take from American military forays into foreign countries is that ultimately there's a limit to how long the U.S. can stay if segments of the country (and its neighbors) remain violently hostile to that presence.
Moreover, the effort to lay this at the president's feet strains credulity. The architects of America's failures in Iraq (such as they are) are those who urged on the invasion in the first place. It was obvious from the beginning that the war's cheerleaders had hyped the surge precisely because they understood that the ramshackle state they had bequeathed the Obama administration might collapse. The political imperative was blame shifting and lo-and-behold, that is precisely what has happened.
This does not exempt the Obama administration from their fair share of criticism - it's clear that they wanted to retain a large military presence inside Iraq and failed to convince the Iraqis otherwise. By their own standards, they failed to achieve their objective. The post-hoc effort to spin this failure as fidelity to a campaign pledge is ridiculous.