Obama’s Iraq Minefield
Scanning the daily press, an American voter is likely to come away with the following characterization of Barack Obama: he opposed the Iraq war from the start, he conscientiously opposed it even when public opinion was against him, and if elected president, he would withdraw U.S. forces from there immediately. There is every reason to assume that Obama’s antiwar credentials have enabled his all-but-certain victory in the Democratic primary, and yet few have attempted scrutiny of those credentials (the New Republic and Commentary are the rare exceptions), let alone analyzed Obama’s policy prescriptions for how to resolve a smoldering crisis in Mesopotamia. As with much of his electoral appeal, the stump catechisms of “hope” and “change” have eclipsed Obama’s more wavering rhetoric about Iraq over the past five years. And as for what he plans to do going forward, his ideas are not just frighteningly ill informed and out of date, they’re not even on nodding terms with the realities in a part of the world that, since 9/11, has held a monopoly on our attention.
In October 2002, the then-Illinois state senator addressed an antiwar rally in Chicago, where, describing himself as no pacifist, he affirmed, “I… know Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors… and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.”
Obama went on to campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as having been against regime change, ab initio. He lost that contest to Chicago favorite Bobby Rush, but has congratulated himself ever since for, as he put it in a debate at Dartmouth College in 2007, “telling the truth to the American people even when [it was] tough…standing up against this war at a time where [sic] it was very unpopular. And I was risking my political career, because I was in the middle of a U.S. Senate race.” Left out of this courageous resume is the fact that it was in his proximate political interest to take the position he did. He was trying to appeal, after all, to what the New Republic‘s Michael Crowley called a “coalition of lakefront liberals and African Americans,” and he was running in solidly Democratic state from a district – Hyde Park – that was heavily antiwar. Obama’s own campaign manager at the time, Dan Shomon, admitted, “He knew, and I knew, that the liberal progressives were key in any Democratic primary.” Obama may very well have been sincere in his opposition to the war, but he could not have adopted any other position and still have had a shot at winning a contentious primary. Also, his courage in telling harsh truths to the American people cannot account for why he twice removed his Chicago speech from his presidential campaign website – a curious elision for a man who claims to have had greater prescience and “purity” on Iraq than any of his opponents on either side of the aisle did.
Far from being “above politics,” Obama has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to play the sordid game with almost undetectable skill. He has indeed equivocated and contradicted himself on the war, and he has more or less confessed to tilting whichever way the wind blows for the purposes of political expediency. When challenged with some of his own wobblier pronouncements on holding fellow Democrats to account for authorizing the war, he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that the party had just put up “a nominee for the presidency and a vice president, both of whom had voted for the war. And so it probably was the wrong time for me to be making a strong case against our party’s nominees’ decisions when it came to Iraq.”
Thus Obama was willing to sacrifice his own belief in the folly of Kerry and Edwards’s decisions so as not to rock the boat on their way to the White House. What else might he be willing to sacrifice, go silent on, or obfuscate, when he himself is the one running for president? In an interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker in 2007, before he had declared his presidential candidacy and when he was still in the habit of giving Hillary Clinton her due: “[P]erhaps the reason I thought [the war] was such a bad idea was that I didn’t have the benefit of U.S. intelligence. And, for those who did, it might have led to a different set of choices… [Clinton] and I were in different circumstances at that time: I was running for the U.S. Senate, she had to take a vote, and casting votes is always a difficult test.” No doubt it is. But lest this generous dispensation to his future rival lead you to credit Obama for his humility and self-criticism, consider that the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, on which he claimed to have based his antiwar stance, conceded that Saddam had an arsenal of WMD but did not pose an imminent threat. As Crowley shrewdly puts it, “If Obama already accepted that Saddam had WMD, why would the intelligence have changed his view about war?” What would he have learned from classified information that he didn’t already know and that any one of the former Democratic contenders for president this year might have trotted out in their defense for voting to go to war?
Obama wasn’t even clear about being unclear. In November 2004, after winning his senate race against the farcical Alan Keyes, Charlie Rose asked him the same question – would he have voted against authorizing the president to go to war? Obama answered that time with a definitive “Yes.” Though he allowed that since U.S. forces were already fighting and dying in Iraq, “we’ve got to do everything we can to stabilize the country, to make it successful, because we’ll have too much at stake in the Middle East. And that’s the position that I continue to take.”
It took Obama almost a year before he gave another major speech on the war, though he did say, in July 2004, that his position was “not that much different” from George Bush’s – referring to the occupation. He attempted recently to explain his reticence as that of a freshman lawmaker who didn’t want to showboat during in his first year in Congress. When he did finally address the war, in November 2005, amidst the fervent leftist talk about “immediate” troop withdrawal, he struck a cautious tone, saying that our exit strategy ought to be conservative and gradual. He was against a full withdrawal but favored a reduction in forces. In June 2006, after the Golden Mosque bombing and the intensification of sectarian violence, Obama visited Iraq and came away even more chastened: “I’m… acutely aware,” he said, “that a precipitous withdrawal of our troops, driven by Congressional edict rather than the realities on the ground, will not undo the mistakes… It could compound them. It could compound them by plunging Iraq into an even deeper, and perhaps, irreparable crisis.”
Yet it didn’t take long for him to alter course and rhetoric again. By November 2006 he was calling for a “phased” withdrawal of troops, albeit without a rigid timeline for its implementation. He argued that a “redeployment could be temporarily suspended if the parties in Iraq reach an effective political arrangement that stabilizes the situation and they offer us a clear and compelling rationale for maintaining certain troop levels.”
When the President announced the “surge” in January 2007, Obama was vociferously against it, claiming it would not diminish violence. In February, after he announced his candidacy, he offered a plan that would bring all of the U.S.’s combat troops home by March 2008, or about thirteen months from that point, a projection that should have been the wake-up call for anyone serious about ending the war to realize that Obama was slightly less than serious. For one thing, it would take, by a conservative estimate, 16 months to do what Obama said could be done in thirteen. His current nebulous plan has made the necessary calendric correction, but the possibility of implementing it is still remote. Recall that President Bush announced on live television the infusion of 21,000 additional troops into Iraq. There were a few hiccups and head-scratches among keen observers of the actual deployment when 30,000 in fact were sent over, prompting the surge’s chief architect, Robert Kagan, to pen an apologia of his original math in The Weekly Standard. What accounted for the 9,000-man discrepancy?
There is a calculable difference between “combat brigades” and total armed forces. According to Slate‘s Fred Kaplan, who wrote about the military logistics of remaining in and leaving Iraq in The Atlantic in June 2006, “[f]or each American soldier capable of going out on patrol or fighting insurgents, there are five support troops supplying his needs,” meaning that, at the pre-surge level of 130,000 troops, “only about 25,000 [were] combat troops.” These are the guys who routinely draw arms against insurgents, not their ancillaries such as MPs, signals officers and the like. Obama’s current plan – and here I quote from “Barack Obama: Turning the Page in Iraq,” his official campaign document on his war policy – calls for the removal of “one or two brigades every month, to be completed by the end of next year.” It allows for the maintenance of a “residual force” to “protect American diplomatic and military personnel in Iraq” and to continue battling al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. As for what “military personnel” will remain apart from that residual force, or how extensive that force will be, the Obama camp is mums, and for good reason.
Consider the following: The bulk of our presence is Iraq is confined to what are known as Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), which are mostly located outside of cities and have excellent security. There are about 70 FOBs all across the country right now, and more than a dozen are giant military installations reminiscent, as Kaplan wrote, “of the West German garrisons from Cold War days,” the removal of which, needless to say, will not be easy, swift or likely given the capital investments they represent. Nor should one expect these facilities to be left unattended or manned solely by Iraqis. John McCain was quite right when he spoke of a prolonged U.S. presence in the Gulf, provided – and Obama and McCain’s liberal critics always fail to recapitulate this necessary condition – U.S. troops are not being targeted or killed. Most troops reside safely in these well-fortified FOBs, and they might continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As for the rest of the Pentagon’s materiel – tanks, trucks, armored vehicles, etc. – this will have to be evacuated slowly and under duress, with most of it traveling by ground toward Kuwait down Route Tampa, a highway favored by insurgents for its murderous potential due to its narrowness. (Evacuations by air would occur at an even more glacial pace, as the largest U.S. cargo plane can carry only one or two tanks per trip. There are 1,900 tanks in total in Iraq at present.)
The probable Obama model for withdrawal, if he ever gets around to sharing specifics, will in any event call for 30-35,000 troops, or roughly five brigades, to stay behind. In April, the candidate tellingly queried David Petraeus on the feasibility of keeping roughly this number in country if “we had the current status quo” in terms of security. Kaplan, too, cited 30,000 as the most “stripped-down” contingent required to occupy the FOBs. But even Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the Iraq Study Group and has endorsed Obama, has scuppered the idea of setting any firm withdrawal date-it just isn’t possible, says the reputed “realist.” More notoriously, Obama’s former foreign policy adviser Samantha Power was fired not for calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” but for telling another truth, namely that any cited plan for withdrawal is a “best-case-scenario” subject to revision once Obama becomes commander-in-chief. Another way of saying this is that his current crowd-pleasing peroration of “Bring Them Home Now” is a feint.
Yet there are still more unsettling aspects of Obama’s inchoate Iraq plan. His campaign literature states: “If Iraq makes political progress and their security forces are not sectarian, we would also continue training the Iraqi Security Forces.” Why should political progress be a precondition for training these forces – it wasn’t in the Iraq Study Group report, which cited failed reconciliation as a reason to concentrate more on military training as opposed to U.S.-led combat missions? And how many residual troops does Obama estimate will be required for such an enterprise?
Obama also demands that a “United Nations-Led Constitutional Convention” assemble to revise the current Iraqi constitution, which he sees as insufficiently inclusive Sunnis. This convention would “not adjourn until national reconciliation is reached and contentious questions such as federalism, oil revenue sharing, and de-Ba’athification are resolved.” Is no one at the Obama Headquarters aware that in February of this year, Iraq’s National Assembly passed a provincial councils law mandating new provincial elections by October 1; an amnesty law under which thousands of Sunnis imprisoned without charges will be released; and a de-Ba’athification law giving thousands of Saddam-era bureaucrats the ability to reassume their government jobs? Moreover, oil revenue sharing may not yet exist at the de jure level but it does exist at the de facto one, courtesy of a $48 billion budget that was also passed by parliament, allocating $10 billion – earned mainly from oil production – for even distribution to all eighteen provinces of Iraq. Does this sure sign of “political progress” mean Obama will similarly greenlight, as per the above, the further training of Iraqi forces? And how will that affect his overall drawdown strategy?
A more urgent question is this: How does Obama purport to restore America to its mythic former place of glory and esteem in the Middle East if he doesn’t bother to follow the news in the Middle East? The senator should update his website. And then he should have someone on his staff investigate what the typical Iraqi opinion is of the United Nations, selected by him to serve in the delicate role of constitutional revision and arbitration. Jonathan Foreman, a brilliant journalist and a contributor to Pajamas Media, has written of the native antipathy for the supranational body that produced immiserating sanctions, a decade of failed weapons inspections, and a secretary-general, Kofi Annan, who returned from Baghdad in 1998 declaring that Saddam was a man he could do business with. (Kofi’s son Kojo actually did reap illegal profits from the oil-for-food program, so Iraqi indignation on this score might be described as both righteous and misplaced). At any rate, the U.N. has not had an active presence in Iraq since insurgents bombed its embassy in 2003, killing its charismatic top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Obama further says wants to foster “regional stability,” particularly vital “given recent claims from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iran will fill any vacuum created by American withdrawal.” Since he is campaigning for that selfsame withdrawal, why does he suppose Ahmadinejad will call the whole thing off just because he asks him to? Is he really that charming in person? Evidently so: “Obama also would be a tough negotiator with Syria and Iran,” continues his “Turning the Page” manifesto, “sending a clear message that they need to stop meddling in Iraq’s affairs.” Nice work if you can get it, but since Obama has clearly stopped meddling in Iraq’s affairs himself, not bothering to even keep up with significant events in its constitutionally certified government, his proposal to erase America’s military footprint and resort solely to diplomacy now begins to seem reckless and utopian – even more so than the adventurism he blames for getting us into this mess in the first place. How can anyone in possession of the foregoing facts and quotations be convinced of Obama’s superior judgment of what he once called “the most important foreign policy-decision in a generation”? He has been the beneficiary of luck, public obliviousness, media incuriosity and –much to her everlasting exasperation — Hillary Clinton’s inability to make any of this resonate with a smitten electorate. (And why has it never occurred to any journalist or pundit fond of the hypothetical to ask Obama if he would have voted for the Iraq Liberation Act, which passed unanimously in the Senate in 1998? A good follow-up to this would be to probe him on what he, as president, would have done to uphold that law short of removing the genocidal tyrant who necessitated it.)
There is every expectation that Obama will have his bluff called sooner or later. Adolph Reed, a prominent black leftist intellectual who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, published a fascinating and undervalued essay in current issue of The Progressive magazine. It is titled “Obama No.” Professor Reed followed the resistible rise of this young Chicago politico for quite some time and never liked what he saw:
Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people.
The GOP has apparently amassed 1,000 pages of opposition research on the opponent. What are the odds that Obama will not eventually be tasked with his contradictions and falsehoods and alarming displays of ignorance on Iraq?
Michael Weiss is the New York Editor of Pajamas Media. His blog is Snarksmith.
I still cannot find anyone on the left that can explain how cutting and running in Iraq will end the War on Terror. I have been asking for 5 years now.
That fact coupled with the fact that we have won in Iraq puts the cut and run crowd in a very tender position for November. Don’t think so? Stop watching and reading the MSM.
The Democratically chosen government of Iraq will stand for re-election in October. AQ is finished, running for cover in Pakistan. JAM has surrendered it’s weapons. The Sunni’s and Shittes are co-operating on all fronts.
Of the many players in the Iraqi Civil War, only 3 are left. The elected government, the Iranians and Syria.
Syria is busy with their campaign to recover Lebanon (which is going quite well, thank you), Iran is only going to be stopped by regime change, which only the USA can do.
If President Bush finds enough courage to do in the Mad Dog Mullahs, there will be a political window starting in early September, Late August running thru to the end of the year. President Bush can force Congress to either vote for America or vote for Iran.
The far left does not believe in a “War on Terror”. Frankly it seems many find secret sympatico in Wright’s statements on “Chickens coming home to roost” (since they have a nostalgia for the good old Weather/Baader-Meinhof etc days?). Mr O need make no specific stand on anything at this point, he is the Negusa-Nagast (King of Kings) for the far left in their quest for power. Whether or not he is an ideologue or a pragmatist is unknown to us (and really to them as well), he is the best they have at the moment, so all their eggs must be in his basket.
Barack “Barry” Obama is a very shallow individual. I was one of the few individuals who saw this immediately. Too many people are impressed with Obama’s Harvard University credentials. But there is something they fail to understand: Harvard is a vastly overrated academic institution! Its students are often overly ambitious and more then willing to place their wet finger into the air to see which way the winds of the zeitgeist are blowing. Ninety percent of all Harvard students graduate with honors. The lowering of standards and easy grading may now be the norm. This could especially be true if one is a “man of color.”
“The far left does not believe in a “War on Terror.”
Which is frightening, since it IS a War to Save Liberalism. Think the homosexuals, artists and feminists will be spared by the Jihadists? No, in this Orwellian World, the last folks that the Radicals want dead (the conservative white Christians) are the ones fighting to save the rich latte liberals, feminists, etc. Sad but true…
Mr. Weiss:
A thorough piece, factual and insightful. Clearly your finest yet.
Michael Weiss hits the nail on the head perfectly if a little too wordy: Obama will do whatever he can, say whatever he has to, to get to be President. This is the scariest thing imaginable to me. Obama getting in through a process the Muslims not only have a word for, but support and encourage: taqiya! Not that Islam has anything to do with Obama, but the very human facet of lying to get….Today in the Left, lying is perfectly acceptable in order to smear or destroy opponents. It is no wonder they do not understand the danger terrorism poses to the West. Obama must be made to face his lies, distortions, flip-flops or we are in real trouble.
Thanks for this post. We need more people writing about this in my opinion. The political game is played by just about everyone, on every side. However, I feel Obama has played it, and play it well. Like you said, “Obama has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to play the sordid game with almost undetectable skill.” You didn’t miss any details either. I’m going to be forwarding on this post to several, including some of my very liberal friends. Thanks again.
David Thomson–
Yeah, I think he’s a faux intellectual just like John Kerry. He’s been traveling on this “first-black-president-of-the-Harvard-Law-Review” thing for, what, 20 years? But did he even publish an article or a note in the review that he wrote himself? The law firm he worked for in Chicago is a non-entity. I understand he wasn’t a standout there either. This guy increasingly looks like a mediocrity dressed up in a suit made of newsprint.
Barak Hussein Obama is how deep the Islamic Jihadists have penetrated the Untied States of America – America their greatest enemy and the one that stands in their way to conquering the world. What better way to defeat America from within than from without. America can only ever be defeated from within. Now I fully understand when Ahmadinejad keeps saying that “America is about to be destroyed” and how he can “smell the corpse of Israel”, whilst there are no visible indications why he should make such claims with confidence, unless, of course, he is hoping that America is about to elect a president who will pave the way for America’s fall. One of the strategies that the regime has perfected in the last thirty years is to penetrate its enemy’s and use their weaknesses against them. Those who follow events in Iran on a daily basis understand well how the regime strategically controls and penetrates the Iranian population and nip in the bud as it were, any signs of uprising. The Islamic lobbyists in the USA have worked hard particularly since early 90s. They have won the hearts and minds of many American and European liberals and lefties. America’s and indeed the democratic countries’ weaknesses, as far as the Islamic regime and Jihadists are concerned, are democracy, human rights and liberal values and principles. Through these principles Islamist lobbyists work and assert their ideals. The liberals, leftists, anarchists, socialists and other fringe activists look after the Islamic Jiahadists’ interests by these principles. Obama wants to take that one step further. He wants to give them their “legitimate claims”.
Legitimate claime?
Obama believes Hamas and Hizbullahs claims are legitimate!
“”The U.S. needs a foreign policy that “looks at the root causes of problems and dangers.” Obama compared Hezbollah to Hamas. Both need to be compelled to understand that “they’re going down a blind alley with violence that weakens their legitimate claims… If they decide to shift, we’re going to recognize that. That’s an evolution that should be recognized”"
Hams and Hezbullahs’ claims are:
annihilation of state of Israel;
return of American solders back to America from Iraq and Afghanistan so that they can take over the Iraqi oil and use Afghanistan to breed and train more terrorists;
destroy American influences around the globe;
abolition of values and principles of democracy and human rights in Muslim countries;
implementation of the barbaric Islamic Sharia laws in secular and Christian Europe and America and wherever there is a Muslim community;
and nuclear bombs.
Obama believes these are legitimate!!!!
From Obama’s own website we have his “goals” and ideas about Iraq in writing. To put it simply…the naivite, lack of judgement, and “audicity” is astounding:
“Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.
…
Obama will launch the most aggressive diplomatic effort in recent American history to reach a new compact on the stability of Iraq and the Middle East. This effort will include all of Iraq’s neighbors — including Iran and Syria. This compact will aim to secure Iraq’s borders; keep neighboring countries from meddling inside Iraq; isolate al Qaeda; support reconciliation among Iraq’s sectarian groups; and provide financial support for Iraq’s reconstruction.
…
He will provide at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, and ensure that Iraqis inside their own country can find a safe-haven.
…
Obama has a plan to immediately begin withdrawing our troops engaged in combat operations at a pace of one or two brigades every month, to be completed by the end of next year. He would call for a new constitutional convention in Iraq, convened with the United Nations, which would not adjourn until Iraq’s leaders reach a new accord on reconciliation. He would use presidential leadership to surge our diplomacy with all of the nations of the region on behalf of a new regional security compact.”
Gee…ALL this from a junior Senator of 2+ years of experience on the national scene, and absolutely NO accomplishments or legislation of ANY kind passed or implemented during his time in office… and he expects the world and Iraq and it’s neighbors, Iran and Syria, to follow his “suggestions”, scrap the constitution millions of Iraqi’s voted on, have the UN “convene” a “convention” to form a new government, and let Syria and Iran join in to help “secure” Iraq’s fledgling democracy…
Somehow, the “audacity of hope” seems like a highly inadequate phrase to describe what is truely being asked of voters…
This doesn’t sound right:
“Obama went on to campaign for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate as having been against regime change ab initio. He lost that contest to Chicago favorite Bobby Rush, ”
Obama lost the primary for the House to Bobby Rush in 2000 (bobby rush the former black panther allegedly derided BHO as a white man with black skin)
from wikipedia article on bobby rush
“In the 2000 Democratic primary, Rush defeated challenger Barack Obama, who was subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 [1]. ”
BHO obviuously won the dem primary in 2004, so unless there was another senate primary in 2002, and BHO ran and lost to Bobby Rush in two consecutive democratic primaries, then the author’s confused the house primary BHO lost with the senate primary he won. and if the lost primary was the house race, then its odd to call Bobby Rush the “Chicago favorite” since both candidates were Chicagoans running in a primary in in Chicago.
Iran. Hamas. Hezbollah. Al Qaeda. Supposed “War on Terror.” Blah, blah, blah.
Just a bunch of wedge issues designed to distract us and divide us from the message of hope and change sweeping over our nation, breaking on te horizon and promising a new dawn of Hope and change from the past darkness, despair, and decadence.
Like Michelle said, “Let´s get back to talking about real issues, like HOPE, like change, like a new America where young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight can come together as one voice saying, “We want Obama!”
Let’s see if I can get rid of those troublesome underscores…
Did that work?
Does everyting have to be underlined?
I am sure you will vote for John McCain who can’t even remember Insurgents from Taliban or anyone else. He says one thing and turns around and contradicts that. His only claim to war is as a POW which isn’t very strategic. You might want this killing spree to go on forever but I sure as hell don’t. Obama said he wasn’t opposed to war, he was opposed to a stupid war and Iraq is a stupid war. And at least Obama has enough intelligence to ask the right questions like who is this mess in Iraq helping….let’s see Haliburton and the rest?? Instead of building fricking resorts over there we should be rebuilding the destruction we caused. We weren’t attacked by Iraq we were attacked by mostly Saudi Arabians joining Osama. But to tell you the truth a lot of evidence is pointing in another direction. We might ought to concern ourselves with if our own government is trustworthy. I sure as hell can’t believe one thing Bush or Cheney spews out. What a disgrace!
Given the above, I’d say a future President Obama, having quickly racked up a string of foreign and domestic policy fiascos, won’t have to worry about winning a second term.
Nope, Prince Charming will instead be spending all his time focusing like a laser beam on how to get through his first term without resigning or being impeached first.
“It is merely a matter of time before Barack Obama — the self-proclaimed antiwar candidate — will have to face his contradictions”
No, it’s not. Who is going to hold this man accountable? The media. Nope. His supporters? Nope. Everyone else is out of the publicity loop.
The more Barack Obama speaks, the less the certainty of his position, particularly on Iraq, Israel and the security of the the country he seeks to lead as President. He displays a lack of understanding of the problems confronting the United States. He uses terms which are intentionally vague so as to be able to contend, when challenged, that he was misunderstood.
Obama wants to replace a US “occupation” with a UN occupation meant to force Iraqis to alter their constitution?
The same UN that turned tail and ran when the terrorists blew up its headquarters?
Who will monitor Iraq’s constitution after the UN runs away next time? Who will protect its fragile democracy? The same human-shield blue helmets that are facilitating the re-arming of Hizbullah in Lebanon?
Obama is risible.
“Yeah, I think he’s a faux intellectual just like John Kerry. He’s been traveling on this “first-black-president-of-the-Harvard-Law-Review… ”
Better to have a real intellectual like John McCain.
Workman:
Why does leftist ranting always end up in the fevered swamp of conspiracy theories?
“Halliburton”? Lions and tigers and bears–oh, my! Is that supposed to mean something? Is that supposed to scare us? Is the dread name of Halliburton supposed to obviate the need for you to make a coherent argument? That only works for others like yourself who don the tinfoil hat.
I hate to disappoint you and deflate your paranoid fantasies, but Halliburton is a construction company that builds things out of big containers. It’s not the Death Star.
Um
“…prompting the surge’s chief architect, Robert Kagan,”
You mean Fred Kagan, Robert’s younger brother?
Nothing like “hope and change” “breaking on the horizon” to bring out those willing to hand over the reigns of power in the free world to a naive, neophyte demagogue.
Be careful of the change you hope for…
you may just get a whole lotta change you weren’t expecting, and none of it good!
Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq.
…
Obama will launch the most aggressive diplomatic effort in recent American history to reach a new compact on the stability of Iraq and the Middle East. http://www.barackobama.com/issues/foreignpolicy/
Talk loudly and throw away your stick.
You know what I am going to like about this election? That the Bush Syndrome of the left will hopefully subside. At least they wont be able to use them for a diversion for their own f***** up people.
Obama will launch the most aggressive diplomatic effort…
Just what is aggressive diplomacy? Anyone want to explain that?
No it will likely bring the focus of jihadist farther South, into the oil rich , Shiite dominant Hasa and Hejaz regions of Saudi Arabia ; where the main checkpoints of Ras Tanura, Ab Quaiq, & Yanbu, are based. Which will trigger an Iranian response in the region.
Which makes things very interesting in deed.
Great piece, if lengthy.
Re: McCain “not being an intellectual”: given the choice between a man of character who makes no pretenses at being an intellectual of any sorts, and a hack politician pretending to be an intellectual, my choice is easily made.
“Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. … Talk loudly and throw away your stick.” – huxley
“huxley”: WELL SAID!
Also well stated:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDUwNTRmMDI1N2U3OWY5MWRkNTcxNDM1OTVhODdkMWI=
What did you expect? Did you think you could let people like Bill Ayers and Angela Davis take over education in America and still have an intelligent electorate after grinding two or three generations through the mill?
Neglect of the intellectual, emotional, and ethical development of your children has results in the real world. You will pay.
@Dave: +1
Here is the definitive word on change from the great philosopher Smokey Robinson:
“Ain’t nothing so bad it can’t get worse…”
Let’s hope we don’t get an object lesson in this concept by way of an Obama administration.
Feb 1 2008
“”I don’t want to just end the war, I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place.”
-Barack Obama
Barrack Obama said the threat from Iran is “tiny”, then a few days later described it as “grave”. He promised to meet the Iranian president in the first year of his presidencey, then claimed he never said such a thing. There is a candidate suffering from senility here, no doubt.
Diplomacy with North Korea hasn’t stopped them from their nuclear ambitions, much less (reportedly) aiding Syria in building nuclear facilities. North Koreans still live on tree barks and stray dogs that cross their path.
Barrack Obama may even resurrect South Korea’s incredibly stupid “Sunshine Policy” towards their commie neighbors that failed to achieve anything in the long run. Americans, vote against this man.
@mishu
“aggressive diplomacy”, I believe, means he’ll speak to them about hope and change but he’ll be really, really charming. Surely there’s no flaw in that plan…
Hope and Change. Aggressive diplomacy means “hoping our enemies will change” and not much else.
Winston Churchill had it right: Given the choice between War and Dishonor, they chose Dishonor. They will have War.
We will have war. Our Adversaries haven’t given up.
This is an excellent article.
To be fair to Obama, if he DID know what was going on and had a workable detailed plan for Iraq, the American people are so childish and simplistic and stuck in their ways that a plan that took into account all of the complexities would, if disclosed now, be ridiculed and would reduce Obama’s ability to win the election, something that is already difficult due to his complete lack of any qualifications for the job, his associations, his unlikeable wife, the fact he went to mosque in Indonesia, etcetera. Imagine if Obama was completely honest and said, “I was raised as a Muslim in Indonesia, was later an atheist, then at age 26 I realized that my presidential chances would be zero unless I joined a Christian church, so I found one I was most comfortable with. I carefully considered my words on the Iraq War over the years and my votes with an eye to giving myself an out if the war should succeed and become popular, or if it should fail and become an albatross around the neck of its supporters. As it turns out, I was lucky because it failed, and the media protected me from my contradictory statements.” Do you really think he would be the nominee if he had said this?
In 2001, Bush DID NOT say, “I’m about as qualified for the presidency as a pile of bricks. If my daddy hadn’t been president and erased my arrest record and paid off or threatened various witnesses, and if the media hadn’t protected me from scrutiny and relentlessly mocked Al Gore in 2000, I wouldn’t have gotten close enough for Jeb and Katherine Harris to steal it for me. And Cheney told me there was going to be a terrorist attack in September, and we were gonna let it happen, and I said OK, but I was thinking maybe an Oklahoma City type deal. Not a huge attack like that. I was surprised while I was reading that goat book and they told me 2 jets hit those towers. But Cheney and Karl was right, after that I could get away with anything. It turned out good.” Bush was not about to tell the truth, and neither is Obama.
I’m not saying that Obama is a criminal freak like Bush. I am saying that he is a mystery man who, like Bush in 2000, has received little real scrutiny. We DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL HE WILL DO IF HE MAKES IT. So much for informed democracy. Roll the dice and hope is more like it.
Hey Barack, let’s blame the media, instead of you and Michelle taking some responsibility for your own actions. Maybe the public doesn’t like it when a potential first lady makes statements about America being mean, or not being proud of America until her husband is elected. Or, maybe it’s because you joined Barack in subjecting your small children to the likes of Anti-American racist Jeremiah Wright throughout their entire childhood.