Fairy tale turned nightmare: Obama, liberal warmonger-in-chief, can’t be trusted on Iraq
D.K. Jamaal
August 18, 2009
In January 2008, while defending Hillary’s vote to authorize use of force in Iraq, Bill Clinton slammed then-candidate Obama’s anti-war hypocrisy, declaring that Obama's vaunted opposition to the Iraq War was a farce.
Bill pointed out that Obama admitted he didn’t know how he would have voted on the war had he been in the Senate at the time, that Obama had once said "there was no difference" between his stance on the war and that of President Bush, and that when it came to funding the war Obama’s voting record was identical to Hillary’s.
"Give me a break," Clinton continued to applause. "The whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen."
At the time, the Obama campaign and Obama’s media allies quickly libeled Clinton as racist for affirming that Obama's anti-war bonafides were fictitious. Since then, President Obama’s pro-war activities have ratified Clinton's old complaint about Obama’s false anti-Iraq sanctimony.
President Barack Obama speaks at the Veterans of Foreign Wars
National Convention on Aug. 17. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
As President, Obama has timidly held to Bush’s own plan to move troops from Iraqi cities by June 2009, this despite complaining about that deal as a Presidential candidate. Purportedly, the 130,000 American soldiers still in Iraq are now based in rural areas. Breaking his campaign promise to begin removing combat forces immediately, Obama told a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention yesterday, "We will begin removing our combat brigades from Iraq later this year."
Later this year? The President has already stepped back from his original May 2010 deadline for withdrawal of combat troops. Will the new August 2010 deadline hold or be broken also now that General Odierno, the commander of forces in Iraq, is requesting more troops?
Similar to its muddled on-again, off-again support for a health care public option, the Obama administration has sent mixed signals about ending the war. Obama told the VFW group: "We will remove all our combat brigades by the end of next August. And we will remove all our troops from Iraq by the end of 2011."
But earlier statements by Pentagon officials including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who wields enormous bipartisan influence, indicated that those combat brigades will simply be renamed – "advisory and assistance brigades," "brigades enhanced for stability operations" and "brigade combat team-security force assistance" are just some of the names floated thus far.
Gen. Ray Odierno holds a press conference in Iraq. The top U.S.
commander in Iraq said that he wants to deploy more soldiers, a
departure the planned pull back. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban, file)
It’s all very 1984, a game of semantics and wordplay intended to dupe the true believers. The likely reality is that Obama’s White House probably intends to keep anywhere from 50,000 to 70,000 don't-call-them-combat brigades in Iraq indefinitely beyond the August 2010 deadline.
The necessity of those expanded troop levels is up for fair debate. The unacceptability of the Democrats' insincerity on Iraq is not.
Unsurprisingly, none of this seems to alarm the suddenly quiet anti-war movement, despite Obama’s history of hedging on his progressive pledges. Neither are they apparently alarmed that Obama is doing Bush one better by ratcheting up the war in Afghanistan. One can only imagine the apoplexy from Democrats had John McCain implemented an Afghan surge as President.
The silence from the "anti-war" left on Obama’s warmongering indicates that for many, opposition to Iraq was never really about bringing the troops home. It was about intense dislike of Bush. If Bush had declared that dogs bark, his opponents would have sworn they meow. It was, indeed, all a fairly tale…
...Or was it a nightmare? |
