This is how Dems plan ahead.

Then-Senator John Kerry said in 2004 that he actually did vote for the $87 billion before he voted against it.

Then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told America in 2010 that the House had to pass the Affordable Care Act so that they could find out what’s in it.

Now, another top Democrat has said that the U.S. military had to leave Iraq in order to maintain a military presence there.

Deputy National Security Adviser Anthony Blinken made the statement Wednesday during a speech at the Carnegie Endowment think tank, Defense News reported.

“In effect, we had to leave in order to find a way back on the security side, and gradually build up our engagement,” he said.

Blinken told the audience that the Obama administration had tried to work out a deal in 2011 that would have allowed the United States to keep training and counterterrorism personnel as well as a squadron of F-16 aircraft in Iraq to counter al-Qaida.

But “the Iraqi body politic did not want us to stay in Iraq,” he said. “That’s what happened.”

According to many accounts, Obama’s full and precipitous withdrawal from Iraq helped to create the conditions that allowed the rise of the Islamic State.

Less than three years after the last American troops left Iraq, only about half of all Iraqi Army units are operationally capable, Defense News reported.

But the Orwellian doublespeak was not limited to one statement by Blinken.

Violence had been so decreased by the “surge” of American troops under President George W. Bush that Iraqi leaders were confident they no longer needed a U.S. military presence to maintain security, he said.

“We were also, to some extent, the victim of success,” Blinken explained.

Given that the “success” occurred under President Bush, this could have been an exceptionally roundabout way to return to the administration’s “blame Bush” motif, but Blinken probably wasn’t thinking that hard.

It’s more likely that he was trying to engage in another Orwellian favorite, rewriting history, in this case to allow Obama to take credit for the success that led to his failure to maintain a troop presence in Iraq.

The Obama administration: so good, we’re bad.

That’s catchy. They should think about getting new business cards.

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George Upper

George Upper is a U.S. Army special operations veteran, an academic, a poet, and an MBA who started writing political news and commentary when people stopped listening to his rants in person.

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