“What I would not have had done was left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down.” So said President Obama in Tuesday night’s debate. And he was speaking the truth, as readers of Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor’s fine new book The Endgame can attest, even though Obama was ostensibly committed in 2011 to maintaining a continuing U.S. troop presence in Iraq.
Gordon and Trainor note that Obama steadily whittled down the number of troops he was willing to keep in Iraq. Commanders wanted more than 20,000 initially, but the president eventually was willing to provide fewer than 5,000. And he insisted on such strict conditions in Status of Forces negotiations—the Obama administration demanded that the Iraqi parliament ratify any grant of immunity to U.S. troops even though there was no legal or political requirement to do so—that Iraqi leaders got a clear signal that the U.S. wasn’t committed to their country. That made them less willing to compromise in negotiations. And Obama did not give enough time to those negotiations in any case—they only began in the middle of 2011 even though the last such negotiations, in 2008, had taken nearly a year. Then, when the negotiations ran into obstacles, Obama pulled the plug and trumpeted the return of the troops.
Obama got what he wanted—at least for the short term. He can brag to voters that he got out of Iraq. But the long-term consequences may not be to his liking—at least if he is concerned about his legacy. As retired Gen. Jack Keane, a key architect of the surge, notes in this Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Al Qaeda in Iraq has doubled in size in the year since U.S. troops left the country.” That’s not only a grave danger for the U.S. and our allies in the region—it’s also a grave danger to the long-term reputation of a president whose signature foreign policy achievement has been the killing of al-Qaeda’s leader. Osama bin Laden may be dead but, as Keane notes, al-Qaeda affiliates in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and Sinai are very much alive. Obama can’t be blamed for all of these developments—al-Qaeda affiliates were well entrenched in Somalia and Yemen before he came into office. But their growth in Libya, Syria, Sinai, and Iraq have occurred on his watch and have been spurred to some extent by his misguided policies—especially true in the case of Iraq.
Iraq may now look to Obama as a shining exemplar of his foreign policy vision. But I predict that in a few years it will be widely recognized as one of his biggest failures.
The president, in his inimitable parallel-universe way, likes to compare himself with Lincoln. Well I shall go out on a limb here with the claim that the greatest feat of political courage and grit since Lincoln's dogged persistence in 1862–63, bar none, was George W. Bush's absolute refusal to call off the surge in Iraq in 2006–07. Bush was under pressure to quit of such intensity that a paper-pansy imposter such as Obama cannot begin to imagine it, pressure from the Democrats certainly—but so what, the evil opinions of fools can be tolerated—but, what was far more discouraging, rebuke from a majority of the public as well, even from within his own party, and of course from an abusive media after his scalp and howling like all the demons of Hell in chorus combined. His tenacity over the course of two years in the teeth of savage political opposition, defeatism at home, and battlefield casualties that mounted dramatically for six bloody months illustrates exactly why, in matters of war, a commander-in-chief of integrity, ONE honorable individual, is an irreplaceable necessity. n nBush has never been properly credited for his steadfastness, and by temperament he refrained from stepping into center strange when the surge succeeded, casualties plummeted, and Iraq stabilized, when even his opponents were forced to admit that he had been right. It then became crystal clear that a steely determination on the part of the president had been required to ensure that all the sacrifices that had been made to that point had not been made in vain. Nor do I believe it ever occurred to him to think of himself as a Lincoln either. Such cheap posturing is best left to the B-actor sort of president. n nOf course not all of Bush's opponents conceded that they had been mistaken in opposing the surge. We can all think of one particularly opportunistic and repulsive Senator from Illinois who didn't, a man who instead did everything in his power to ensure that an offensive on which everything depended would fail miserably; yet who is simultaneously possessed of such monstrous self-regard as to claim for himself, apparently in all seriousness and without qualm, the merit of having ended the war in Iraq. That he should then go on to throw it all away because of sheer thoughtlessness and sloth is more than enough to make the rocks cry out and the heavens weep at the sheer ignominy and shamelessness of his self-absorption. I do not believe I shall ever see the like contrast between two men so closely linked by circumstance so long as I live.
Had Bush attacked the Iranian nuclear facilities during roughly the same time frame,I would agree with everything that anadessma said.But unfortunately all his critics,especially those within the Republican orbit, wore him down vis-a-vis Iran. Obama ,campus blame America first lefty that he is at heart,has snatched Defeat from the jaws of Victory. It would have taken Churchill to attack Iran's nukes during the Iraq war-and I believe Bush wanted to and would have but for the appeasement/isolationists on both sides of the aisle and in the public at large who,after all,elected the Apologizer -in Chief.