Representative Seth Moulton (D-MA), an Iraq War veteran argued that while “we wouldn’t be in this mess at all if George Bush hadn’t invaded Iraq with faulty intelligence back in 2003” pulling out of Iraq “created this political vacuum that ISIS came in to occupy” on Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”
Moulton said, “We have a military strategy to defeat ISIS, but we don’t have any long-term political strategy to ensure the peace. And that’s why we find ourselves back in Iraq, again today, re-fighting the same battles that I and my fellow Marines and soldiers fought just 8 or 10 years ago.”
He added, “[W]e already fought these same battles against al Qaeda, but then when we pulled out of Iraq so quickly, and not just pulling out the troops, I’m talking about pulling out the diplomats, the people who were working in the prime minister’s office, in the ministries, the Iraqi government just went off the rails, and as a result, created this political vacuum that ISIS came in to occupy.”
Moulton also argued that the White House’s statements the US is not in a combat mission against ISIS in Iraq are “simply not true. This absolutely is a combat mission. … [T]here’s a very fine line between an advisory mission, and full-fledged combat, and it’s very clear from the death of the Navy SEAL just last week that is absolutely a combat mission.”
He concluded, “[S]ome would say that this is trying to do war on the cheap, just like the Bush administration, when they got us involved in the first place. Let’s not forget that we wouldn’t be in this mess at all if George Bush hadn’t invaded Iraq with faulty intelligence back in 2003. But, this is a president who promised to get us out of Iraq, and then promised to use the tools of diplomacy to prevent wars from happening, and that just hasn’t happened. … [O]ur solution, our strategy is to train Iraqi troops. Well, you don’t fix Iraqi politics by training Iraqi troops, and Iraqi politics are broken. that’s the fundamental problem in Iraq that we need to fix.”
(h/t GOP War Room)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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