Obama’s Lies #2: Between Iraq And A Hard Place
OttO on Aug 13 2008 at 7:45 am | Filed under: Jihad Watch, Politics, Radicals, War On The War On Terror
The Obama's position on winning in Iraq is that we never should have been there in the first place. Barack Obama is trying to present himself as both flexible and inflexible in regards to his stated campaign promise: "…When I am Commander-in-Chief, I will set a new goal on day one: I will end this war."
So does it or does it not matter what is happening in the theater? Obama says that He will listen to and assess the input from ground force commanders and military brass in regards to when it is and isn't safe to make drastic changes in the Iraq situation. He also says that as the CIC, He will set a new mission for the generals to achieve, namely getting the troops out. So what if they oppose that? Then what? If He listens to generals who are troubled by His mission, does He consider abandoning His mission? Or does He act in accordance with one of his previous positions which was to more or less blow off the recommendations of the people managing the conflict? If a turn for the worse or a turn for the better…does either really matter?
That approach ignores five years of living history on which demonstrates that it is vital that a president be flexible enough and observant enough to know that saying that 'we should have never ousted Saddam Hussein from power (because with Saddam in power, all of our problems would be gone)' is not a strategy.
How are we to trust a commander-in-chief who ignores all data from an ongoing war and all input from it's commanders to make his decisions based on the post-toddler position of 'we shouldn't have gone there in the first place'? I still don't get Obama's view that losing in Iraq will help us win in Afghanistan, which, even if it's true - and it's not - it's like saying if I sell my Mercedes that will help me buy a Ford Taurus and then I can attract an entire new class of women. It's sophomoric. And it's based on a lie.
I stated some time ago that if we were to abandon Iraq when Harry Reid and Barack Obama wanted to do so a year-and-a-half ago, there would be no point or hope of continuing the fight in Afghanistan or elsewhere (though the fighting would continue). Handing the enemy the method on how to defeat the US military - or more accurately, defeat the US Congress - would ensure that it is repeated, with more determination and confidence than previously displayed.
The whole take-from-Iraq-and-give-to-Afghanistan plan is based on a lie. A big lie. From the ground up.
We'll get to the lie. First, the motivation behind this Obama position. It about represents the safest position that Obama could take on the war. He can end the war in Iraq "without preconditions" and appease his anti-war handlers. He can also put at ease some of the hawks and moderates who believe that Al Qaeda must be defeated <em>somewhere</em>. It may become more difficult, as November approaches, to convince people that abandoning Iraq on a phony pretext is the way to go since Rasmussen is reporting that for the first time since 2004, a majority of Americans believe we are winning the war. Regardless, Obama maintains the perception of sanity by not pulling out of both Iraq <em>and</em> Afghanistan - which fits in perfectly with the big lie and clumsily reaches out to supporters of the war without compromising the base and propping up the lie: the lie that the Left has always supported the mission in Afghanistan.
One of my more satisfying moments as a blogger was a few years ago when an outspoken nemesis claimed that his opposition to the Iraq War was rationalized by the fact that he supported the Afghanistan invasion. I confronted him on it, he stuck to his story and I was fortunately able to produce exchanges I had with him in early 2002 where he clearly and passionately opposed invading Afghanistan. Is there a conservative who was blogging during the months after 9/11 who didn't debate people opposed to invading Afghanistan? Those people gave many of the same arguments against Afghanistan as they would against Iraq a little over a year later. But during the buildup to Iraq, suddenly you had to search for a leftist who opposed Afghanistan.
Why is that? Especially considering that just during the first days of the Afghanistan war the anti-war left was already smearing the invasion with much of the same language and claims that they later used for Iraq. On October 31, 2001, just three weeks into the war the NY Times asked, "Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam?". MediaMonitorNetworks reported on November 21, 2001 (a week after Kabul fell to the Americans and a week before Mullah 'Cyclops' Omar fled Kandahar) with another question, "Is Afghanistan slipping into a quagmire?"
Time Magazine reported on October 31, 2001 , that because the "war in Afghanistan drags on without any bankable signs of progress" [in it's third week of American's running roughshod over the Taliban!] they declared the "Halloween Word for the Pundits" was "Quagmire". In a country where the Soviets struggled for ten years, American boots had barely hit the sand before opponents were calling it not only a quagmire, but lost. Anti-war comments were peppered with mockery of the mission after our failure to capture bin Laden in the initial run. The obligatory invocation of Vietnam emerged.
The Left didn't want to go in and they didn't see or necessarily care for a victory there - after all, only 88% of Americans supported that war; someone was against it! So why the change of heart and where precisely did it emerge?
The Left now will claim (in alliance with Obama) that being in Iraq is distracting us from the goal of capturing and destroying the organizations that perpetrated the September 11 attacks. That concerns them now when all conventional wisdom says that AQ leadership is hiding in Pakistan. In 2001, it didn't seem to matter that the leaders behind the attack were actually in Afghanistan daring us to invade. People who opposed the Afghanistan invasion for the usual laundry list of reasons are now eager to get back to the fight there, even tap dancing around the possibility that a confrontation with a nuclear armed nation of 168 million Muslims might be considered in the efforts to capture a handful of men.
Democrats become incessant about wars with setbacks but are quick to get America involved in some of the bloodiest confrontations in our history. Afghanistan was a sure-loser; Iraq was a sure-loser. Now that Iraq is begin to become shielded against the ritualistic claims of Leftist prophets, their answer is to move troops back into the other sure-loser. Since it's not enough of a sure-loser, let's throw Pakistan into the mix - it's better to have a hostile nuclear threat than an unstable and flawed ally.
But that is now; this was then. Since seizing Afghanistan from the Taliban was such a quick and resounding success and more questions could be fueled about the necessity or legitimacy of invading Iraq, the Left managed to move stealth-like from opposing the first war to opposing the second. After establishing an echo-chamber for attempting to stop the Iraq invasion, suddenly the Afghanistan war that they opposed became their own political tool. An Iraq invasion would never be as popular as the Afghanistan invasion and they capitalized on that by doing what they do best: rewriting history. By hitching on to the Afghanistan cart they could use that to legitimize their contempt for ousting Saddam Hussein. After all, Leftist-prophets could paint their pictures of doom and gloom with reason and rationale because…they backed the previous invasion. They weren't just anti-war mouthpieces - they were selectively opposing an Iraq invasion based on substance rather than fanatically opposing it based on political ideals.
In the years since the Iraq invasion, Afghanistan suddenly turned into the war that Leftists wanted to win, or at least fight. Some of the most consistent complaints during Iraq's post-invasion era was that we were distracted from fighting in Afghanistan, that it was now, years later, imperative to go back and get the perpetrators of 9/11, the very perps they opposed getting in 2001 and the only way to do that would be to lose in Iraq.
The Obama is simply carrying that torch. Back to my automobile analogy:
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "Afghanistan is running out of targets." Or infamously said if you buy into the way his words were spun by the Left.
The point is that the war on terror has been about getting Osama bin Laden. But of course in a world that doesn't fold up neatly like the pages of The Nation publication the war has been about so much more and Iraq was intricate to much of it. Osama may not have been in Iraq but Saddam Hussein was. Hussein was the most open and hostile state supporter of international terrorism in the world, in conflict with the Bush Doctrine of 2001. Iraq is positioned in the heart of the middle east; Afghanistan is not. Iraq has infrastructure; Afghanistan does not. Iraq has oil; Afghanistan has a pipe.
For good measure, add Saddam's history of invasions, use of wmds against civilian populations, his threats against the US, his financial support for Palestinian suicide bombers, his multiple violations of ceasefire resolutions, including his consistent attacks against no-fly-zone enforcements…the question almost becomes, 'In what world wouldn't we move from Afghanistan to Iraq?'
War with Saddam Hussein was surely inevitable. I have no doubt in my mind that even had we not invaded in March of 2003, we would still be in Iraq today, only with a more complex geopolitical layout and more questions than answers on Iraq's WMD capabilities.
Win in Iraq, President Obama - and win decisively. Then maybe you won't have to start all over from the ground up in Afghanistan, which is no more appealing today than it was seven years ago, despite the political advantages of pretending it is so.
