August 12, 2016 – Delaware Liberal

Friday Open Thread [8.12.16]

By Delaware Dem August 12, 201622 Comments

Zack Beauchamp at Vox brings up pesky things calls facts as he explains that ISIS was founded well before President Obama took office:

In short: The group that would become ISIS was founded in Jordan in 1999, and became devoted to holding territory in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003. You can debate which of these constitutes ISIS’s "founding" in some metaphysical sense. But by any definition, the group was founded well before President Obama came into office. Trump is just flatly wrong on this. [...] Okay, a Trump defender might say, but Trump’s real point isn’t that Obama "created" ISIS. It’s that Obama withdrew US troops from Iraq in 2011, creating a security vacuum that allowed ISIS to regain its strength. This is a pretty standard conservative narrative, one not at all unique to Trump. It is, however, quite wrong. The real sources of ISIS’s recent growth were the Syrian civil war and political sectarianism in Iraq, neither of which was within the power of United States to prevent.

Hell, if we had stayed in Iraq, the only thing that would have changed is that more American soldiers would be dead today, not less Iraqi and Syrian civilians.