When former President George W. Bush makes a rare visit to Washington today, he won’t criticize President Obama for the bloodletting Obama unleashed with his withdrawal from Iraq. After leaving office, Bush promised Obama his silence. He is a man of his word.Thiessen goes on to babble about Bush's other warnings about pulling out of Iraq. Because Thiessen thinks Bush's surge worked, and keeping troops in Iraq was necessary, although Thiessen doesn't bother to suggest how long they would have been necessary, or when or if it ever would have been possible to pull troops out of Iraq. But beyond such minor details, the real point and the big picture sails right over Thiessen's head. Or maybe he wants it to sail right over his readers' heads. You decide.But if Bush did speak out, here is what he ought to say:
I told you so.
In the summer of 2007, Bush warned of the dire consequence of pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq against the advice of our commanders on the ground.
To people like Thiessen the Iraq disaster seems to start with the U.S. pulling troops out of Iraq. They don't bother with the question of how those troops got into Iraq in the first place. The hundreds and hundreds of lies. The unfathomable carnage. The money burned.
To promote their shamelessly dishonest narrative, all Thiessen and his ilk have to do is to ignore and elide history itself. Because the continuing disaster in Iraq didn't start because President Obama pulled troops out of Iraq, it started because the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice team invaded Iraq in the first place. Which then-State Senator Barack Obama opposed.