Really? Saddam Would Be Better?

I've noticed that some defenders of President Obama like to say that the reason the Islamic State is controlling so much of Iraq is because we invaded Iraq and got rid of Saddam.  That is nonsense.

The notion is that as odious as he was, he kept the Islamists down. This is nonsense. Before we invaded, Saddam had turned to Islam for legitimacy and imported jihadis for his Saddam's Fedayeen organization.

The notion requires you to forget that we smashed up jihadis in Iraq so much that President Obama could boast that al Qaeda was dead. After our campaign, the jihadis alienated much of the Islamic world by both their bloody swathe of destruction through Moslem areas and their defeat which showed them to be the 'weak horse" and not the "strong horse."

ISIL/ISIS walked through northern Iraq (and western Iraq) this year because we abandoned Iraq in 2011. As one of our generals said, it is hard to imagine our presence not preventing the sequence of events that led to this year's events.

I'd also like to point out the obvious, as well. If we hadn't invaded Iraq, perhaps jihadis wouldn't control northern Iraq. That is most likely a solid prediction.

But we would have had Saddam Hussein in control of Iraq--or one of his psychotic spawn in charge. Does anyone really want to argue that such an alternative would have been better?

Plus we would have had jihadis in Iraq under state sponsorship and we would have had al Qaeda jihadis elsewhere since we would not have smashed them up inside Iraq.

So really, nice try to avoid placing the snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory right in President Obama's lap where it belongs.