2016 USA Presidential election thread II: And. Here. We. Go!

[Zealot]

Sounds like something a liar would say.

Damn.

[Zealot]

Correct me if I'm wrong but the draw down of troops in Iraq was set before Obama even took office, Bush had set the time table for troop withdrawal before he left. Obama actually wanted to keep the troops there longer but the Iraqi government refused to give the troops blanket immunity from anything that might happen if they stayed. It'd be more accurate to say Bush created ISIS, or rather created the vacuum that allowed them to flourish.

Not to mention that Trump supported the troop withdrawal in 2007.

A reporter gave Trump the chance to align his statements with this (albeit still blaming the President) and he refused to go along with it.

[Aerin]

Stop trying to apply logic to anything Trump says, you'll only hurt yourself.

You're right, my bad.

[archibaldcrane]

What does my level of security clearance have to do with Hillary being a liar?

It just means that you're so mad Hillary isn't in Guantanamo because of her emails that you'll dig up a lie from 8 years ago about something that happened 20 years ago to support your ridiculous assertion that Hillary is a "pathological liar".

[Krandor]

So when people pull up some lawsuit against Trump from 20 years ago it's cool but not when they pull up something from Hillary's past? Weren't you trumpeting him being a serial rapist just a few days ago?

Also, she wouldn't be in Gitmo, not that it actually matters to what your saying.

[archibaldcrane]

Sorry, i meant a CIA black site

[Krandor]

Archie, I want football to start so we can be friends again.

[archibaldcrane]

Just bend the knee to the future Queen Commander and we're all good.

[Krandor]

I mean, technically I don't have a choice as long as I remain in the military (assuming she wins).

[Andalusian girls]

Correct me if I'm wrong but the draw down of troops in Iraq was set before Obama even took office, Bush had set the time table for troop withdrawal before he left. Obama actually wanted to keep the troops there longer but the Iraqi government refused to give the troops blanket immunity from anything that might happen if they stayed. It'd be more accurate to say Bush created ISIS, or rather created the vacuum that allowed them to flourish.

Not to mention that Trump supported the troop withdrawal in 2007.

there was a SOFA signed by Dubya in 2008 which included the withdrawal schedule Obama adhered to, but SOFAs are renegotiated all the time. it was clear to all principle actors at the time, including General Odierno, Director Petraeus, Secretary Panetta, the JCS, and one Secretary Clinton, that Iraq needed a continued American presence for counterterrorism operations, military training, and political stabilization. but Obama had made ending the Iraq War one of his central campaign goals, seeing such as a fulfillment of a promise made to the American people and and a way to rectify the wrongs of the Bush administration, and there are some, like John McCain, who believe he intentionally sabotaged negotiations with the Maliki government. i do not, but it is clear his heart was never in the negotiations, he did not want American troops to remain and so lifted not a finger to ensure they would, and this is not some partisan hindsight these are criticisms leveled at him from his own cabinet members.

in Defense Secretary Panetta's words

To my frustration, the White House coordinated the negotiations but never really led them. Officials there seemed content to endorse an agreement if State and Defense could reach one, but without the President’s active advocacy, al-Maliki was allowed to slip away. The deal never materialized. To this day, I believe that a small U.S. troop presence in Iraq could have effectively advised the Iraqi military on how to deal with al-Qaeda’s resurgence and the sectarian violence that has engulfed the country.

in retrospect it was the greatest geopolitical miscalculation America made since the initial decision to invade Iraq and is the ugliest and most tragic aspect of Obama's legacy.

[Ragnus]

Trump is tanking so hard right now, I'm pretty confident in saying I'd be happy to see the Greens and Libertarians get enough support to become major parties as well. Maybe if we have 3+ major parties, we might see some changes to the 270 electoral vote system.

[Krandor]

The problem with your idea is that as long as fptp exists, they'll never be major parties.

[Dimmauk]

LMAO @ republicans signing a letter to cut funding for Trump

[kisada]

it's amazing that we have 90 or so days left till the election still

[Melena]

If anything , this election is letting everyone learn a lot about family and friends

[kisada]

trump's only way to heaven is to win the presidency

[Aerin]

there was a SOFA signed by Dubya in 2008 which included the withdrawal schedule Obama adhered to, but SOFAs are renegotiated all the time. it was clear to all principle actors at the time, including General Odierno, Director Petraeus, Secretary Panetta, the JCS, and one Secretary Clinton, that Iraq needed a continued American presence for counterterrorism operations, military training, and political stabilization. but Obama had made ending the Iraq War one of his central campaign goals, seeing such as a fulfillment of a promise made to the American people and and a way to rectify the wrongs of the Bush administration, and there are some, like John McCain, who believe he intentionally sabotaged negotiations with the Maliki government. i do not, but it is clear his heart was never in the negotiations, he did not want American troops to remain and so lifted not a finger to ensure they would, and this is not some partisan hindsight these are criticisms leveled at him from his own cabinet members.

in Defense Secretary Panetta's words


in retrospect it was the greatest geopolitical miscalculation America made since the initial decision to invade Iraq and is the ugliest and most tragic aspect of Obama's legacy.

Ah okay, I still need to read Panetta's book. Thanks for the info.

Also, looks like Trump's sealed his fate by saying he's not going to change a thing. It even sounds like he expects to lose.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/11/politi...ion/index.html

[archibaldcrane]

AG, here's an interesting counterpoint to the idea that we could've kept troops there if we wanted to, and that they would've made a huge difference in stopping ISIS.

Curious what you think.

http://www.vox.com/2016/8/11/1243874...ded-isis-trump

The relevant section

The US withdrawal from Iraq under Obama wasn’t the reason ISIS grew

Okay, a Trump defender might say, but Trump’s real point isn’t that Obama "created" ISIS. It’s that Obama withdrew US troops from Iraq in 2011, creating a security vacuum that allowed ISIS to regain its strength.

This is a pretty standard conservative narrative, one not at all unique to Trump. It is, however, quite wrong. The real sources of ISIS’s recent growth were the Syrian civil war and political sectarianism in Iraq, neither of which was within the power of United States to prevent.

By 2010, "Iraq finally had relatively good security, a generous state budget, and positive relations among the country’s various ethnic and religious communities," Zaid al-Ali, author of The Struggle for Iraq's Future, wrote in Foreign Policy. But that strong position was squandered. Then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki stripped his political opponents of power, appointed his cronies to run the army, and killed peaceful protesters.

Most importantly, Maliki reconstructed the Iraqi state along sectarian lines, privileging the Shia majority over the Sunni minority. This exacerbated Iraq's existing sectarian tensions: Sunni Iraqis, after all, had long and falsely believed themselves to be Iraqi's majority (owing to Saddam-era propaganda). They saw Maliki as depriving them of their rightful control of the state — and his actions deepened their belief that the Iraqi state was fundamentally illegitimate.

Around this same time as this was happening, Syria erupted in Arab Spring protests and, eventually, descended into civil war. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the current leader of ISIS who was at the time in Iraq, saw the chaos as an opportunity, sending a contingent of fighters to Syria to set up shop there in late 2011.

These two developments — Iraq’s unraveling and Syria’s civil war — created a perfect incubator for ISIS.

Growing political sectarianism in Iraq helped the group rebuild its core Iraqi fighting force. The war in Syria allowed them to gain weapons, battlefield experience, funding, and a different avenue for recruiting. Its growth in Syria led it to start calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria — or ISIS, for short.

This is the key problem with Trump’s claim about Obama and ISIS. In order for his accusation to be true, he needs to be able to explain how leaving US troops in Iraq would have been able to stop either the Syrian civil war or avert the Maliki government’s sectarian turn. US troops could have killed ISIS fighters, sure, but that wouldn’t have solved the root causes of the group’s growth.

Remember, US troops couldn’t destroy ISIS during the post-2003 war on their own. The key cause of AQI’s defeat then was an Iraqi Sunni uprising, which wasn’t in the cards given the Iraqi government’s sectarian policies between 2009 and 2014. And that’s to say nothing of the idea that US troops in Iraq could somehow have stopped ISIS’s growth in Syria.

Moreover, it’s not obvious that American troops could even have stayed in Iraq given Iraqi politics. The 2011 withdrawal was the result of a status of forces agreement (SOFA) signed by the Bush administration in December 2008. The Obama administration actually attempted to renegotiate the SOFA and insert a provision that would leave between 5,000 and 10,000 troops in the country.

But the negotiations to keep US troops in Iraq were always doomed, largely due to Iraqi politics. The new deal would have needed to go through Iraq’s parliament. The overwhelming majority of both Sunni and Shia Iraqi voters, understandably still angry about the US invasion, wanted American troops gone. Iraqi MPs would not have risked their jobs in support of a US troop presence that many of them also resented.

"The Iraqis had a vote here, and made it very clear that they wanted a clear end date when US troops would leave the country," Douglas Ollivant, the National Security Council director for Iraq from 2008 to 2009, said in a 2012 interview with Iraq expert Joel Wing. "From the Iraqi perspective, this agreement was always about our withdrawal, and our presence over the last three years was simply a temporary accommodation to allow us to do that in an orderly manner."

Bottom line? US troops probably would not have stopped ISIS’s rise, and, even if they could have, there would have been very little Obama could have done to make sure they stayed in Iraq. Trump is simply wrong.

[ringthree]

AG, here's an interesting counterpoint to the idea that we could've kept troops there if we wanted to, and that they would've made a huge difference in stopping ISIS.

Curious what you think.

http://www.vox.com/2016/8/11/1243874...ded-isis-trump

The relevant section

I think the last paragraph is the most telling. I don't think that the rise of Islamic extremism could have been completely stopped, but with a decent SOFA we could have delayed and deferred it's development as it spread. I am very liberal and very supportive of this administration, but I think there is more we could have done to leverage more troops staying. Maybe not too surprisingly, Clinton was one of a team of people that wanted to do more.

[Quicklet]

RNC and the Trump campaign to meet in an emergency meeting tomorrow:

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/0...meeting-226938

Trump on Thursday night challenged reports that the RNC might shift resources down ballot, warning in an interview on Fox News “if it is true, that’s okay too because all I have to do is stop funding the Republican Party.”

An RNC member said discontent with the Trump campaign has hit new heights in recent days, describing “major tumult in the building and staff problems and disagreements and RNC staff on the edge of mutiny.”

What a dysfunctional relationship...