SOFA: No, Not The Kind You Sit On, But The Kind You Leave Iraq With

So it’s Sunday morning and all hell has broken loose in Iraq so I’m positive that everyone who got everything wrong in regard to the invasion of Iraq will be on television to share more of their pearls of wisdom with the American people. I’m also positive that the chaos will be President Obama’s fault and that somehow the Sunday morning talk shows will be full of republicans discussing Iraq while managing to never utter the word "Bush". Yes, it will be an amazing thing to behold. So amazing that I don’t plan on watching. It’s going to be too predictable and infuriating.

I just wanted to write a quick post to clear up a couple of things that I’m positive will be fabricated for you by Fox, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bill Kristol, Wolfowitz, and everyone else who is directly responsible for this shit storm. Everyone but Bush. He’s going to remain in his undisclosed location, quietly fucking up his brother’s aspirations to run for president.

I imagine that an accusation about Obama "getting out too soon" will be made. Because we all know that a decade and two trillion dollars just isn’t enough to get the job done. If we stayed in Iraq for 1,000 more years, what is happening now would be happening 1,002 years from now. The smart people who were right about what would happen if we invaded Iraq are telling me so, and I believe them because that’s how credibility works. When you’re been correct in the past, you’ve earned some. When you’ve been tragically misguided and never acknowledge that you’re wrong, you get none. 

Let’s be very clear about the circumstances of our departure. The timing had exactly nothing to do with President Obama. Bush had signed a "Status of forces agreement" (SOFA) in December of 2008, right before he slinked out of the white house in shame, and with record low approval ratings. That agreement mandated that US troops leave Iraq by January 1, 2012 unless the Iraqi government negotiated a new agreement to extend that deadline. Obama did his damndest to prolong that ill-conceived nightmare of a war but mercifully, he didn’t succeed.

So on October, 2011 when Obama announced that the US would be leaving Iraq by January 1, 2012, he wasn’t actually announcing an accomplishment he had made. He was simply letting us know that the US was going to abide by the agreement that Bush had made.

Why do I tell you this? Because the drumbeat of revisionism is about to start again, and it’s going to come from the same people that created this nightmare in the first place. People who genuinely need to revise history because they simply can’t see how very wrong they were. The invasion of Iraq should never have happened, and the minute we killed Saddam, the civil war that is now starting became an inevitability. We literally could not have stayed long enough to ever prevent what is happening now from happening. It was always going to happen sometime after we left. Say what you will about Saddam, but he managed the unmanageable task of ruling three different groups of people that should never have been forced into one country. Joe Biden was right about splitting Iraq into three different countries, and that’s going to become obvious to the world in a few years. But he’s never going to get credit for getting it right because that’s not how the right wing rolls. When they fuck things up and make the world a harder place for people to live in, they just revise history a la the mythology of Saint Ronnie.

Fortunately, we have the internet now to record the actual events of the time. And since we know the internet is forever, I just want to make sure that my little corner was preserved for posterity with the facts.