America's Iraq involvement according to Dexter

The former NYT and current New Yorker reporter Dexter Filkins was never too keen on the way we dealt with Iraq, going back the the days of the Baathist regime and the suspicion that it was amassing a WMD arsenal.  Still, he knew positive developments when he saw them:

in 2008, while at the NYT, he wrote extensively about the success of the surge just a few months before the presidential election. A month later, Filkins wrote again about the “literally unrecognizable” and peaceful Iraq produced by the surge. Six years later, Filkins was among the skeptics reminding people that the Iraqis’ insistence on negotiating the immunity clause for American troops was more of a welcome excuse for Obama to choose total withdrawal — and claim credit for it until this year — rather than the deal-breaker Obama now declares that it was.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air excerpts at length from a New Yorker piece Filkins wrote in  April that recounts some recent Iraqi history we've recounted here at LITD: Shiite Maliki ordering the arrest of Sunni vice president Hashemi in the immediate aftermath of US withdrawal, ensuing crackdowns and corruption.

Morrissey then also excerpts from the transcript of Hugh Hewitt's radio show in which Hewitt interviews Filkins, who talks about this sequence of events, and states quite plainly that it is evidence that, of all the errors the US has made with regard to Iraq in the last fifteen years, the 2011 total withdrawal was most definitely the worst.

Read the whole thing.