According to a Washington Post article the Obama administration ignored what was happening in Iraq’s Maliki. As the result, the country has gradually slipped into what some are saying if not stopped, could end up in a civil war.
Senior Republican lawmakers, along with some Democrats and outside Iraq experts; say the problem was not that Maliki wasn’t listening, but that President Obama wasn’t speaking loudly enough to get his attention. They charge that Obama dropped the ball on Iraq long ago, when he failed to negotiate a long-term security agreement that would have left a residual American force behind, and that he paid too little mind to the developing crisis.
“I do blame Prime Minister Maliki,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in a vituperative speech on the Senate floor Thursday. “But we were not there to influence him.”
“If the troops had stayed,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said, “this would have been a very different outcome. The absence of a follow-on force allowed security to fall down…” Graham said. “Obama had absolutely no desire to leave one person on the ground in Iraq… Now, he wants to tell the world that it was the Iraqis “who wanted American troops to depart, I know different,” Graham said.