You might find this enlightening, Mq: Success on the Iraqi ground breeds a conundrum, a conundrum Obama may very well solve by, presto!, suggesting that there are really two distinct Iraq wars:
standpointmag.co.uk
The Hard Question for Obama on Iraq
Friday 4th July 2008
Barack Obama has had an Iraq problem building over the last ten months. Ever since General Petraeus’s Iraq counter-insurgency strategy, involving “the surge” of troop deployments in theater, has shown signs of success, the Democratic Party and its attendant commentators have been in a quandary.
Last summer, as the Sunni tribes of Anbar abandoned any alliance with the foreign Islamist militants they’d been hosting and switched sides to cooperate with the US Army, the New York Times editorial page, following the lead of Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power, called for the immediate withdrawal of coalition troops, and acceptance of the prospect of the division of Iraq along sectarian lines--in essence, the possibility of a managed ethnic cleansing. The perversity of such a policy being advanced by Power, the author of the definitive tome of policy failures that led to genocide in Rwanda, went un-remarked.
Meanwhile, Anbar Province, the so-called Wild West, the cradle of the insurgency, encompassing Fallujah, Ramadi and Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, was made peaceful by Iraqi forces, whose own numbers and competency has surged. With assistance from coalition forces, the Iraqi army and militia crushed al Qaeda there, and spat them out. Last week, also largely overlooked by the media, control of Anbar Province, along with two other previously restive provinces, was handed to the sovereign government of Iraq. Extensive coverage is available on the Agence France-Presse website (link to come).
The Democrats confronted, then, in the face an emerging strategic victory in the Middle East, achieved at the cost of more than 4,000 American lives, the question: was this something voters were prepared to abandon after November?
When Samantha Power suggested some months ago, in an interview on Hard Talk, perhaps not, she was promptly “thrown under the bus” of the Obama campaign.
Yesterday, in a move long anticipated by conservative bloggers in America, Obama, an early opponent of “the Iraq war,” softened his Iraq Withdrawal Timeline, stating in a news conference: "I would be a poor commander in chief if I didn't take facts on the ground into account. The pace of withdrawal would be dictated by the safety and security of our troops and the need to maintain stability."
His shift here opens the question of what has been “The Iraq War.” Was its onset the March 2003 invasion? Or, as some in the Bush administration argued, has the US been legally in a state of war since the first Gulf War, including throughout the 1990s as the Clinton administration sporadically bombed the recalcitrant regime of Saddam Hussein?
In fact, we may soon see Barack Obama, who made his “anti-war” stance a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, become the first prominent Democrat to recognize a distinction between the brief 2003 war to overturn the regime of Saddam Hussein, and the more recent counter-insurgency effort to support the democratically-elected, pluralist government now sitting in Baghdad, as they desperately try to build a civil society.
It is, after all, possible to have opposed the first, and yet support the latter of those two wars. |
