From Tim Arango – Baghdad Bureau Chief for the New York Times…
It’s not my job to rate the Obama Administration’s actions in Iraq. But I will tell you that after 2011 the administration basically ignored the country. they did not want to see what was really happening because it conflicted with the narrative that they left Iraq in reasonably good shape. In 2012 as violence was escalating I wrote a story, citing UN statistics, that showed how civilian deaths from attacks were rising.
Tony Blinken, who was then Biden’s national security guy and a top Iraq official, pushed back, and even wrote a letter to the editor, saying that violence was near record lows. But that was not true. even after Fallujah fell to ISIS at the end of last year, the administration would push back on stories about Maliki’s sectarian tendencies, saying they didn’t see it that way.
So there was a concerted effort by the Administration to not acknowledge the obvious until it became so apparent — with the fall of Mosul — that Iraq was collapsing.
