Muscatine

President Obama’s failure to leave any troops in Iraq is already threatening to become a devastating election issue for him, one the president assuredly deserves.

As I’ve written, Obama’s dismissal of his generals’ requests for up to 18,000 troops to remain in the country in order to secure the peace and rebuff Iranian influence – and his half hearted effort to maintain a presence of even a few thousand – is a mistake that could ruin the victory George W. Bush handed him.

The move is so inexplicable that it’s fair to ask whether Obama wanted a campaign slogan – “I ended a war” – more than he cared about U.S. strategic interests.

The day after the last U.S. troops departed this week, Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued an arrest warrant for the Sunni vice president. The vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, charged that Iran was the puppeteer behind Maliki. And Maliki also pushed for the ouster of his own deputy prime minister, another Sunni, who called Maliki a “dictator.” Then, a series of explosions in Baghdad killed dozens of people.

With all U.S. troops out of the country, our leverage has declined precipitously, and those who would seek to control the country by force are clearly emboldened.

If Iraq starts to disintegrate, Obama will correctly be under political attack for having failed to honor the enormous U.S. sacrifice in Iraq by safeguarding our achievements.

He’ll try to frame his failure as the inevitable result of Bush’s decision to invade the country. Which would be deeply ironic, since he will be happily campaigning on Bush’s success if things work out.

We already know, because we heard it from Obama, that the continued U.S. economic weakness is Bush’s fault. Soon it will be Iraq. And my understanding from sources deep within the White House is that there is also consideration of blaming Bush for the lack of a white Christmas in the Northeast, but that this is still under review.

Tagged as: Obama Iraq

{ 11 comments }

About seven or eight years ago, I had a really bad case of sciatica. It had lasted months, and the pain down my leg could be excruciating. I visited an orthopedist who, because society was in an uproar about their use, was unwilling to give me prescription-strength pills to alleviate my suffering.

He was unwilling to prescribe me painkillers. But he was willing to do surgery.

I was reminded of this today while I read a piece in the Washington Post describing President Obama’s expanding program of killing bad guys with drones. Obama, you may remember, was the moral crusader against the evils of the Guantanamo Bay prison and perils of rendition, demanding that our enemies be sent to the United States for civilian trials at which every legal courtesy would be theirs – as well as a platform for them to fulminate against our country.

Obama ended the CIA’s detention program and barred the entrance of new prisoners to Gitmo – he didn’t quite close it. Meanwhile, he is dispatching model airplanes around the globe to assassinate suspected terrorists instead, denying us the chance to place them in cockroach-infested cellars and find out what they know.

Obama is unwilling to put suspects in detention. But he is willing to kill them.

Don’t get me wrong, the drone program is generally a good thing, though it’s probably overused. I’m sure if we still had good resources for hanging onto these people, we’d take some of them instead of kill them, and possibly prevent future attacks and develop leads to take out more of their colleagues.

But what hypocrisy. Instead of bringing them to Cuba, where some have eventually been found to be innocent and released, Obama kills them. The highly secretive drone program keeps the president’s hands nice and clean – none of the unpleasantness and bad publicity of having to pry information out of people or decide what to do with them.

It’s how Obama – the man who just abandoned Iraq while staging an ongoing planned retreat from Afganistan – likes it. A nice, antiseptic war that requires minimum U.S. commitment.

I know the headlines say al Qaeda is on its last legs. I wonder, how do we know? Our best intelligence used to come from the prisoners we no longer obtain.

Meanwhile, the man who campaigned as the protector of American values now shoots first and asks questions later.