Who 'Won' Iraq?
Posted 09/01/2010 06:38 PM ET
Leadership: President Obama told the nation Tuesday night that he fulfilled "my pledge to the American people as a candidate for this office" by ending combat in Iraq. Fulfilling his oath of office requires more.
The president may have re-imaged the Oval Office with modernistic lamps and a rug made from recycled fibers, but his ego remained a big part of the decor as he announced on Tuesday night the withdrawal of combat brigades from Iraq.
This drawdown is almost certainly premature, especially considering that Iraq's political situation is in a fragile limbo, but why was he able to do it without all hell breaking loose?
The president's political advisers obviously considered it inconceivable to announce an end to Operation Iraqi Freedom without a tip of the hat to its initiator. And so, the president told viewers that "this afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush."
But let's parse what follows. "It's well-known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset," President Obama notes. Who, though, was right and who was misguided?
Had Barack Obama's advice been followed in 2003, Saddam Hussein would be in power today, routinely murdering innocent Iraqis and oppressing the rest.
Had his advice been followed in 2007, there would have been no surge — which Sen. Obama claimed would not "solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse" — and Iraq today would be awash in the blood of rampant terrorism, with al-Qaida and Iran vying for control of the oil-rich power.
According to President Obama, "no one can doubt President Bush's support for our troops or his love of country and commitment to our security." What was doubted was not Bush's patriotism, but his judgment. And the self-absorbed Obama never bothers to give him the judgmental credit he deserves. That's OK; in the end, history will.
"As I've said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it," the president added. But it's a strange brand of patriotism to want to repeat the ignominy of Vietnam, and the cut-and-runners dominating the Democratic Party were proposing to do just that three short years ago — a repeat performance of the Democratic Congress of the mid-1970s.
The trait of a genuine statesman is to realize that, as Ronald Reagan said, "there is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit." (That's not one of the presidential quotes Obama had embossed onto his new Oval Rug.)
Commentators on the left are exactly right when, like Salon's Joe Conason, they point out that "peace in Iraq is tenuous, and bloody civil conflict could soon break out again" — and that the president chose to leave that fact unsaid to the American people.
Could it be that President Obama did not thank President Bush because when Iraq descends back into chaos, thanks to Obama's premature departure, this administration is going to be in search of someone to blame?
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