A great point was brought up in an article I found on RealClearPolitics.com. It speaks of where we’d be today if Obama had his way with an earlier plan on troop withdrawal from Iraq.
”Obama first introduced legislation for a fixed withdrawal plan on January 30, 2007. According to that plan, all combat brigades would have been out of Iraq by March 31, 2008; that’s 14 months–more or less the same time frame he proposes now. He would have been wrong. Iraq would have seen chaos, not calm and not political reconciliation. That plan would have ensured a monumental historic defeat for the U.S. and a civilian slaughter of biblical proportions in Iraq.”
–Joel
Maliki Proves Timetable’s Distortions
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How about his judgement on not going into Iraq in the first place? Questionable? HA! Maybe we wouldn’t be miserably losing the war in Afghanistan if we’d retained focus on the real terrorists and avoided invading and occupying an unrelated nation, we wouldn’t even be talking about “defeat”!
Justin, in response to this I will have to create another post. Stay tuned. It’s actually an article my brother found. I’m sure you’ll hate it!!
Saying we shouldn’t be there in the first place is not a valid argument with regards to strategy now. We are there, like it or not. What we do now is important, not how we got there. This notion that we shouldn’t have gone in has anything to do with strategy now is absurd. We are there, and we need to win. If Obama thought the surge would make things worse, I can only imagine what he thought would have happened if we had withdrawn when he wanted.
I think this is an indication of Obama’s poor judgment:
Well, listen. I, I actually think that there’s no doubt that the violence has gone down more than any of us anticipated, including President Bush and John McCain. If you, if you would–if you had talked to them and, and said, “You know what? We’re going to bring down violence to the levels that we have,” I think–I, I, I suspect USA Today’s own editorial board wouldn’t have anticipated that. That’s not a, that’s not a hard thing to acknowledge, that the situations have improved more rapidly than we had anticipated. That doesn’t change the broader strategic questions that we’ve got to deal with.
Obama’s handling of his wrong predictions have indicated three things, as pointed out by Peter Wehner…
The first is that when it comes to his stand on Iraq, Obama is like a man trapped in quicksand. The more he fights to justify his past stances, the quicker and deeper he sinks. Obama’s explanations have moved from being misleading to unserious to embarrassing.
The second, and related, conclusion we can reach is that the more Obama talks about the surge, the more his claim that he has the “judgment to lead” is subverted. He has taken an understandable and forgivable mistake in judgment (opposition to the surge) and allowed it to call into question his political character and, by denying the positive effects of the surge for so long, his attachment to reality.
The third conclusion is that Obama has completely obliterated the core early promise of his candidacy: that he would turn the page on American politics and offer us something new and better; that he would speak honestly and candidly, in a way free of ideology and in a manner than demonstrated an open mind, and eschew “spin.”
Obama has not only turned out to be a practitioner of the “old politics”; he has, as a young, first-term senator, come to embody it. He has fallen into seemingly every trap he said he would avoid. All the hype, all the promise, all the high-minded words have turned out to be a mirage. And for those of us who were once impressed with Obama, even as we strongly disagreed with his political ideology, it has been both a fascinating and unsettling thing to witness. Watching a man become what he preaches against often is.
Check out the rest of his article:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/obama-in-iraq-s-quicksand-11869
Eli,
I couldn’t disagree with you more on this about Obama. He has (correctly) identified the surge as a tactic towards a losing strategy. He didn’t endorse it because he wants a change in strategy. Just because the violence has been reduced (and that tactic is at least partially sucessful) doesn’t mean that he should, or has to somehow defend his position on the war! Listen to the major policy speech he made just before he left for Iraq. It makes his case for a different strategy for the Middle East… one that will hopefully cost less money and lives and ACTUALLY acheive some more stability in this region:
Uh.. has the surge not brought about stability in Iraq? It did stop a civil war did it not? As for your statements: “He has (correctly) identified the surge as a tactic towards a losing strategy. He didn’t endorse it because he wants a change in strategy.”
First of all, it WAS a change in strategy, just not the one he wanted; he believed it would horribly fail in the majority of its objectives.
The point is that Obama predicted it would horribly fail, and he was completely wrong. I assert that the surge has actually been the most potent and successful change in strategy so far in the war.
Obama’s “strategy” was to pull out in a deadline style withdrawal… how is this a strategy, let alone a winning one? The country would have erupted into civil war and thousands of Iraqi’s would have been massacred. Sting style special-ops are not something that can bring stability, as our more robust old-strategy has shown. The reason the surge worked so brilliantly is because we leave troops in gained territory so insurgents and terrorists cannot just rush back in once we roll through. This is not something Special Forces can do. If we had removed the majority of our troops under Obama’s “strategy” last year… everything we have put into Iraq: reconstruction, Democracy, and freedom would have been undone. Everything our men and woman in the armed forces have risked their lives to accomplish. Our situation with the war on terror would have become vastly worse due to the emboldening of our enemies.
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