In the latest case of political friendly fire to hit the White House, two new memoirs by heavyweight figures from Barack Obama’s first term have made withering criticisms of the administration’s handling of Iraq.
The censure from within the administration echoes many of the criticisms about the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq that have already been aired by Republicans in this midterm election year and which are likely to feature strongly in the 2016 presidential election.
While Mr Obama bears the brunt of the criticism, the emerging picture from administration insiders about the final years of the US occupation of Iraq is also likely to raise difficult questions for Hillary Clinton, should she run for the White House.
The recently-released memoirs have been written by Leon Panetta, former CIA director and defence secretary, and Christopher Hill, the veteran diplomat who was ambassador in Iraq.
In one of the most stinging rebukes of the president, Mr Panetta, whose Worthy Fights was published on Tuesday, said that Mr Obama had “lost his way”, although the new military campaign against Isis had given him a chance to recapture the initiative.
The summer collapse of a large part of the Iraqi army in the face of the Islamist militants of Isis has set off a wave of political recriminations in Washington, with Republicans blaming the US decision to withdraw completely in 2011 and Democrats pointing to the ill-fated invasion in 2003. The political dilemma for both the White House and Mrs Clinton is that important insiders are echoing some of the Republican narrative.
As lethal sectarian violence rises the US has authorised air strikes to halt the advance of Isis.
Memoirs by senior officials during an administration inevitably attract charges of disloyalty and can be an exercise in shifting the political blame for problems on to an incumbent who cannot fully respond. Yet the two latest memoirs add to the impression of a president who has not won the confidence of some of his most senior national security officials.
Echoing his predecessor at the Pentagon Robert Gates, whose memoir was published in January, Mr Panetta mixes praise for the president’s intelligence with complaints about excessively controlling nature of Mr Obama’s closest White House aides and the sometimes ponderous debates about key issues.
Mr Panetta reserves some of his sharpest words for the events that led up to the departure of US troops from Iraq in late 2011 despite the Pentagon’s desire to maintain a modest force in the country.
The White House, he writes, was “so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.” At a time when the Iraqi government was resisting pressure from the Pentagon to allow a continued military presence to remain, he says that the White House did little to force the issue.
Mr Panetta claims that this precipitate US departure created the conditions for the surge in sectarianism in Iraq and the subsequent rise of Isis. If the US had maintained a military presence in the country, it could have “effectively advised the Iraqi military on how to deal with al-Qaeda’s resurgence and the sectarian violence that has engulfed the country.”
The White House has refused to respond to Mr Panetta’s claims. Josh Earnest, White House spokesman, said Mr Obama was proud that he “served as a senior member of his national security team” and said he would let others pass judgment on Mr Panetta’s decision “about how and when and whether to talk about the experience of serving the president”.
However, Republicans have already leapt on his book’s Iraq sections. “Panetta and others are echoing what is obvious from the outside but it is more powerful when it comes from people on the inside,” said Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana and a possible 2016 presidential candidate.
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Mr Hill, who spent 33 years at the state department and is a former assistant secretary of state for east Asia, has plenty of criticism in his memoir for the Bush administration. “The failure of neoconservatives and their fellow travellers to explain what they were trying to accomplish in Iraq remains one of the most disgraceful performances by a foreign policy class in America,” he writes in Outpost, which was published on Tuesday.
But during his period as US ambassador to Iraq in 2009-10, he paints a picture of Mrs Clinton – then secretary of state – as almost uninterested in Iraq, making only one visit during his period in Baghdad.
He writes that the US had little choice but to accept in 2010 the continuation of Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister after a closely contested election – even though Mr Maliki has since been widely blamed for the subsequent descent into sectarian violence.
On his last day at the state department, Mrs Clinton thanked him for his service and then as he was walking out the door, she added: “Who could have ever thought Maliki should have a second term?”
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