As we are on the cusp of watching helplessly as Islamic extremists carve a caliphate out of Iraq and Syria we need to ask how did we get in this mess. Though we know we left Iraq precipitously because of Obama’s political calculations we’re only now finding out that the administration was aware the situation was unraveling and lied about it.

In an Ask Me Anything forum of Reddit on September 10, New York Times Baghdad Bureau Chief Tim Arango gave an amazingly candid interview:

Arango elaborated on his interactions with Tony Blinken on NPR’s radio program “Fresh Air”:

And there was one bizarre example where – I felt was bizarre – it was a kind of a – not even a huge story I did. But it was a story about the rising levels of violence and the sourcing was, you know, obviously the attacks that are going on. But there was actually United Nations data showing that civilian casualties were up fairly substantially. And the pushback was such that Tony Blinken, who was, you know, Biden’s national security advisor – and I believe he’s now a White House staff on the Obama side – and he wrote a letter to the editor. And he wrote me emails and saying – and his argument came down to that civilian casualties should not be the metric to judge the level of violence in Iraq. They had some other obscure metric to do this.

And so he was trying to claim that Iraq’s violence was at historic lows.

And that always stuck with me because it was sort of – it was just this very stark example of them trying to obfuscate the truth and what was really going on. And they just wanted to move on from Iraq. And so the lengths that they would go to sort of obfuscate the truth was sort of breathtaking in some instances.

What we are looking at is not a deus ex machina, it isn’t a case of crap just happening, this is a case of an American administration deliberately creating the conditions for an Islamic extremist state and then allowing it to develop for no greater reason than to be able to say they got out if Iraq.

There are two salient facts to keep in mind as this alleged attack on ISIS gathers momentum… or not:

• When we left Iraq in 2011, it was on the upswing. There were problems but those problems were exacerbated by the administrations monomaniacal insistence on leaving regardless of cost.

• The administration has know the situation has been deteriorating for three years and rather than take action they not only elected to ignore it, they elected to affirmatively lie about it.