Wesley Clark defends Obama on Iraq pullout

By Jeremy Herb - 11/21/11 06:33 PM ET

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark defended President Obama’s decision to remove all troops from Iraq in advance of Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate on national security.

Republicans on the presidential campaign trail and in Congress have slammed Obama for pulling out all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of the year; presumptive front-runner Mitt Romney said in a statement last month it was either “the result of a naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude in negotiations with the Iraqi government.”

Clark, a Democrat who ran for president in 2004, said at a news conference Monday hosted by the Democratic National Committee that Obama was making good on a campaign promise from 2008, brushing aside criticism of the drawdown.

“It’s an easy charge to make but a false charge,” he said of the drawdown criticism. “This is the decision made by a sovereign nation.”

Clark went on the offensive against the GOP candidates on Iraq and a number of other foreign policy topics as a pre-emptive strike before Tuesday’s GOP debate. Without naming candidates in his prepared remarks, Clark attacked one for saying that the U.S. had lost the war and another for his criticism of timetables.

The chief point of contention over the decision to withdraw troops from Iraq is the country’s refusal to give U.S. soldiers immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts. The president and top military advisers have said that once Iraq decided it would not grant soldiers immunity, the U.S. had no choice but to pull its soldiers out of the country.

At a Senate hearing with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, however, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said that Bush administration negotiators had intended for the agreement that kept soldiers in Iraq to be extended beyond 2011.

Clark said the latest negotiators with Iraq were “very effective diplomats,” not partisan ones. “We do have a plan to have other forces in the region and to maintain our U.S. military presence there even if we’re not on ground with those forces in Iraq,” Clark said. “I think this is a case where it’s an opportunistic target for criticism from the outside, from those who weren’t involved in trying to implement it.”