New Yorker staff writer Dexter Filkins, an outspoken critic of the Bush administration and the Iraq War, told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday that it was "hard to conclude otherwise" that the Obama administration's 2011 withdrawal from Iraq was the "worst strategic decision."
Filkins, who authored a forthcoming New Yorker article on the Kurds fighting ISIL in Iraq, said that after talking with a deserter from the Iraqi army, he found that Iraq clearly "wasn't ready" for U.S. forces to leave.
"The United States left in 2011; we went to zero," Filkins said.
"When you drive around Baghdad now, there is not a trace that the United States was ever there... I think that we spent almost a decade there, we paid with a lot of lives and a lot of blood, and essentially re-building the Iraqi state that we destroyed and, I don't think it was ready, it just wasn't ready to function on its own, and it couldn't function without us."