GOP: We deserve credit on Iraq too

Who ended the war in Iraq?

President Barack Obama says he did. At a campaign event in Norfolk, Va., earlier this week, the commander in chief told the audience, as he often does: ?I promised I?d end the war in Iraq, and I did.?

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But Republicans and former Bush administration officials say the president is forgetting his history.

They point out that President George W. Bush signed a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqis before leaving office in 2009. And that agreement set a date of Dec. 31, 2011 to remove all U.S. troops from the country.

?President Bush did all the heavy lifting,? said Stephen Hadley, the former Bush national security adviser who?s now backing Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

?Yes, President Obama was president when the last troops came out, but it was achieved by a strategy put in place by President Bush,? Hadley told POLITICO. ?It?s another example of continuity between administrations.?

Not only did the agreement spell out a withdrawal date, Hadley noted, but it was Bush who decided to send a ?surge? of troops into Iraq in 2007 to help bring down the violence, paving the way for an end to the war. Then-Sen. Obama opposed the troop surge.

Romney says Obama left Iraq too hastily.

?President Obama?s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women,? Romney said last year.

Romney?s foreign policy and legal director, Alex Wong, said Obama weakened U.S.-Iraqi ties by failing to get an extension of the Status of Forces Agreement, which would have kept some U.S. combat troops in Iraq beyond 2011.

?What we saw in Iraq was a complete failure on the part of President Obama to secure the gradual and responsible transition plan that was recommended by his military commanders and defense secretaries,? Wong said.

?Whether this was the result of incompetence in negotiations or a raw political calculation is an open question,? Wong said. ?But what is certain is that it put the gains so dearly won by our uniformed men and women in Iraq at risk. The president?s attempts to dress up his failure as a ?promise kept? is simply transparent spin.?

The Obama campaign told POLITICO that the president is proud of his record in Iraq.

While the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement laid out plans to end the war, ?the contours of the drawdown ? the specifics about when our forces would be removed, at what pace, when we would bring them home ? was done entirely by President Obama,? said Marie Harf, associate policy director for national security for the Obama campaign.

?Ending wars is much harder than starting wars,? she said.

Source: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/80840.html

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