In the second half of her interview with Bill O’Reilly, airing tonight, Hillary Clinton claims there’s nothing left for the U.S. military to do in Iraq:
First of all, I believe that our military has fulfilled all their military missions . . .There’s no doubt in my mind. They got rid of Saddam Hussein, which they were asked to do. They gave the Iraqis free and fair elections. They gave the Iraqi government the space and time to make the decisions that only the Iraqis can make for themselves . . . There is no military solution to what we face in Iraq, which is unprecedented. It is dangerous, it is unstable.
Well, some might argue that it’s Iraq’s very instability that requires our commitment to staying on and helping. One might even put it this way:
It will matter to us if Iraq totally collapses into civil war, if it becomes a failed state the way Afghanistan was, where terrorists are free to basically set up camp and launch attacks against us.
In fact someone did put it that way: Hillary Clinton. That was her argument against troop withdrawal in late 2005. It’s now 2008, and Iraq is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was then. If she couldn’t justify risking a failed Iraq when things felt truly hopeless, how can she be so dismissive of it now?
Back then, she was concerned about giving Iraqis “an open-ended invitation not to take care of themselves.” It was a good point, and luckily, Iraq didn’t consider our presence as such an invitation. The Sunni Awakening, political reconciliation, and Maliki’s fight against the Sadrists are all clear indications that Iraqis are indeed taking care of themselves.
But we also know that they’re doing it with our help. Maliki successfully routed Mahdi militias out of Basra with the assistance of the U.S. military. That this victory directly led to the country’s largest Sunni bloc coming back into Iraq’s government is a crystalline example of how American force continues to help move Iraq toward viable statehood.
Hillary clearly has no problem contradicting her own weighty proclamations. But in flip-flopping on this one she reveals an unsettling indifference toward a struggling ally.
If McCain understood why increasing government spending/regulation/control is the exact opposite of actual stimulus, he’d be our president today.
“But if the President is serious about working with Republicans and not simply humoring them, he might take some of his former rival’s words to heart.”
Obama will certainly be taking his former rival’s words to heart – and then acting upon them. Regardless of differences in political affiliation/ideology and past differences; there seems to be genuine respect between these two men. There will certainly be many books written about these times and these two in particular in the decades to come. For now, rest assured that McCain’s opinions – no matter how contrary to some of Obama’s overall goals (or the arch-nemesis ultra-liberals so despised by contentionistas) – will be courted, respected and acted upon in almost all cases. Therefore, pending issues on foreign policy, Gitmo, Iraq will certainly have a McCain stamp on them before being finalized by executive order.
And… one more quick note. McCain is a favorite Republican of Democrats simply because of his friendly personality and centrist approach and willingness to find ideal compromises on many of the issues that confront us as a nation. McCain will always have more respect by dems and the population at large than a far more ideological man such as John Boehner for example (from my home state).
Closing Guantanamo is neither a “childish thing” nor a PR stunt. It is an earnest effort to restore America moral standing and to ensure that we wage our struggle against terrorism without compromising our values and ideals. As you note, McCain agrees that closing Guantanamo “is a wise move.”
Obama, in signing his order, said his administration would not “continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals.”
“It is precisely our ideals that give us the strength and the moral high ground to be able to effectively deal with the unthinking violence that we see emanating from terrorist organizations around the world,” Obama said.
Would that Bush had an ounce of Obama’s moral clarity. He might not have been such a total failure.
Moral clarity is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. What kind of moral clarity keeps one in a hate-filled congregation for 20 years, or presumes that all abortions are acceptable right up to the moment of live birth…or even after in the event of a botched abortion?
You may not like Bush’s sense of morals, but I find them far superior to Obama’s.
I can’t believe McCain finally located his stones. Too bad it’s about six months too late.
If Obama’s “moral clarity” is as absolute as DDR suggests, then his tactical obtuseness is boundless. It has been difficult enough since 2001 to achieve the aims of detaining and punishing actual terrorists, distinguishing them from incidental detainees, and obtaining information from them that has enabled us to eliminate more than half the original al Qaeda network, and even more importantly, detect and prevent new plots.
Our ability to sequester terrorists, at GTMO and in CIA-run facilities abroad, has been key to these aims. I don’t know how the advocates for closing GTMO, and terror detention facilities in foreign countries, think we are going to achieve the aims now. Forget averting terror plots: we won’t even be able to distinguish between culpable terrorists and those who ought to be released. No one will talk now. Our most likely action will be to eventually release almost all of the detainees for lack of “evidence” to continue holding them.
The concrete consequences of closing GTMO and the foreign facilities will be loss of information from current detainees, who will have to be moved to US federal prisons and will have constitutional rights there; release of those detainees; and a near-complete reduction in new detentions. As JPod implied yesterday, if the terrorists cannot be detained in a condition of “statelessness” — which IS already their conditions as combatants — the whole enterprise loses meaning. Once we award the foreign terrorists the rights of US citizens, we cannot force them to talk and we cannot hold them. Why detain them in the first place? Certainly not for the privilege of releasing them into the US population, or even the expense of repatriating them.
Ultimately, eliminating the detention facilities will represent a step back on the defensive, in the war on terror. The burden will shift further to our population, and our daily activities, if we want to escape new terrorist attacks. The issue is not even the signal we send to terrorists; it’s the fact that we are deciding not to detain and sort them out BEFORE they attack us. We are deciding, as we speak, that we would rather take the first hit again than detain terrorists — even in humane conditions — in the condition of statelessness they themselves chose to operate in.
Of course, if Obama is NOT making that decision — if, as he has said, he reserves the option of having a “secret protocol” for (apparently) continuing the practices of sequestering terrorists from the US Constitution, and perhaps using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on them — then I’m sorry to inform DDR that this gives me a very poor impression of Obama’s moral clarity. There is nothing moral about basically continuing the Bush policy, but issuing deceptive proclamations and staging showy facility closures — and warning the people that he may do in secret what he decries in public.
“…then I’m sorry to inform DDR that this gives me a very poor impression of Obama’s moral clarity. There is nothing moral about basically continuing the Bush policy, but issuing deceptive proclamations and staging showy facility closures — and warning the people that he may do in secret what he decries in public.”
Excellent points JE. And while I’m a supporter of BHO – I certainly agree that BHO must initiate legislative and policy clarity to achieve moral clarity. I hope that clarity becomes clearer for Obama in the coming weeks/months as he descends from the cloudy altitudes of his rhetoric and idealism. The world is brutal, full of brutal people – and we just have to deal with that and do what it takes to protect the nation. Some people are beyond education and negotiation like most of our terrorist foes. I believe that Obama gets it, but that he is still attempting to appease the utopian idealists that supported his movement.
On another note, thanks for providing the links the other day on WMD in Iraq. It’s good source material. You should submit a resume to work for the Obama administration. They could use logical counter arguments during the “pro & con” discussions regarding foreign policy that you have so much knowlege about. Good guidance is valuable to a president – even if it is contrary to his pre-conceived goals and ideology.
closing Guantanamo represents a step in the right direction; pretty soon the U.S. will be able to join the world community once again