If I were to describe a president who, acting on a long held belief but purportedly responding to the American public’s war-weariness, orders the withdrawal of all American troops and leaving no residual force in a country besieged by diminished but resilient terror groups whose ambitions include attacks against the American homeland, you might assume I was referring to August 2021, but it also describes events from late 2011.
At that time President Barack Obama tasked Gen. Lloyd Austin—the same person who, as Secretary of Defense under Biden, oversaw the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal—with orchestrating the full removal of American forces from Iraq. This withdrawal created a void that ISIS capitalized on, transforming in just few short years from nascent, scattered cells into a deadly terrorist network.
Though President Obama famously called ISIS "the JV team" in an interview with The New Yorker, the terror group went on to establish a physical caliphate that encompassed large swaths of Iraq and Syria. Their acts of terrorism stood out for their barbarism – the beheading of journalists, mass executions of Iraqi soldiers, and burning victims alive. They also demonstrated a capacity to conduct complex terrorist attacks abroad, slaughtering innocents in Paris, Istanbul, and Manchester, England, among other locations.
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