U.S. troops prevented from helping even as al Qaeda overruns Iraqi cities

Obama's losing the war that Bush won.  By failing to negotiate a status of forces agreement at the beginning of his term in office, he guaranteed that Iraq would fall either to Iran or to al Qaeda.

Gen. Keane and others who fought in Iraq are watching their gains slip away. “We’re creeping right back to where the situation was at the beginning of the surge in 2007,” he said. “We’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting close.

“What we could do to help them is some advisers at the major headquarters to provide some advice to them in terms on what the strategy should be and the tactics should be,” he said. “We’re not talking about returning troops again. That’s not going to be politically viable.”

Gen. Keane, who was Army vice chief of staff and a key adviser to the George W. Bush administration on how to defeat the insurgency, said Mr. al-Maliki’s government has returned to its old way of operating.

“We trained them an awful lot on how to do this, but the fact of the matter is they have ignored in the past a lot of our counterinsurgency practices by simply posting checkpoints along roads and being considerably more defensive than what you need to be in terms of a protect-the-population counterinsurgency strategy, which is what they will need to do to gain the momentum back. That’s going to be critical for them,” he said.

Of course he also screwed up Afghanistan.