Hotair.com’s Mary Katharine Ham told Bill O’Reilly the Obama administration could have foreseen the unraveling of Iraq if they had chosen different strategies, saying, "When it comes to these Middle Eastern conflicts our problem has been, the last couple of years, knowing the good guys from the bad. When we had a residual force on the ground in Iraq, we had invested many years in figuring out good guys from bad."
O’Reilly interrupted Ham to call this a "theoretical world", but Ham insisted, "No, we're not in the theoretical world. We’re talking about the past, and it’s important to talk about because I do not want to hear the suggestion that this was inevitable. That, in addition to what’s happening, is gut-wrenching to the people who lost life and limb making these gains. And they were given away."
"When it comes to Iraq you could have anticipated this, as you are pointing out, Bill. You could have left a residual troop and made sure you got the SOFA agreement done, and then perhaps these things would not have been frittered away. And now you're faced with a really tough situation," Ham said.
She also criticized the administration for "wasting" the goodwill of the American people, since "When there is just a tiny bit of goodwill, almost none, for interventionism with the American people, even for our national security, you don't waste it on air strikes in Libya."
Asked by O’Reilly why the president is constantly surprised by various scandals within his administration, Ham replied, "There is an issue of competence and management in all of these federal agencies, and there is the idea that the federal government is so gigantic that it becomes unwieldy and hard to manage."
"That's not an excuse for President Obama," she added, "but it is a problem with the federal government."