AFP – Oct. 03, 2014 -Former Pentagon chief Leon Panetta has denounced the White House in a new memoir, accusing President Barack Obama’s top aides of undercutting efforts to secure a deal in 2011 that could have kept US troops in Iraq.
Retaining a small US force would have helped contain sectarian violence and prevented the conditions that helped open the door to the onslaught of the Islamic State group, which has seized a large area of Iraq in recent months, Panetta argues in a soon-to-be released book, “Worthy Fights.”
In the fall of 2011, “it was clear to me — and many others — that withdrawing all our forces would endanger the fragile stability then barely holding Iraq together,” Panetta wrote in an adapted excerpt published in Time magazine Thursday.
“Privately, the various leadership factions in Iraq all confided that they wanted some US forces to remain as a bulwark against sectarian violence,” he wrote.
While Defense and State Department officials tried to broker an agreement with the Baghdad leadership, the White House took a back seat and showed little determination to make the deal happen, Panetta said.
The US government had “leverage” but chose not to use it, he wrote.
“We could, for instance, have threatened to withdraw reconstruction aid to Iraq” if the then prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, failed to support a continued US presence, he said.