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Obama’s Common Sense Iraq Policy |
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For years, supporters of the misconceived Iraq war, including Bush and McCain, have offered slogans, bravado, and confusion in place of a real policy in Iraq. When a war that was supposed to last only a few weeks, months at the most, stretched on for years, we were told to “stay the course”, that there was a choice between fighting insurgents in Iraq or over here (despite the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or any attack launched on Americans soil), and that anyone who offered a different viewpoint was waving the white flag of surrender.
These advocates for unending war have never gotten Iraq right. They were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to Al Qaeda, wrong about Iraq’s supposed stores of WMD, ready to be unleashed against the United States, wrong about how long the war would last, wrong about how much the war would cost, both in terms of human life and squandered resources, wrong about how this war would affect our national security–it has made us less safe, as our own intelligence reports tell us.
Barack Obama offers a common sense approach to Iraq, one that reflects the view of a sustained and substantial majority of Americans who understand that this war is not strengthening the United States. In an op-ed today, he points out that the Iraqi prime minister himself is calling for a timetable for the removal of American troops (timetables, of course, are something Bush and McCain once decried as the refuge of the defeatist). He rightly obseves that this is an opportunity for us to do what is long overdue–remove our troops from Iraq and re-focus our military on the real threat that confronts us–a regrouping Al Qaeda establishing safe havens in Pakistan and elsewhere.
For far too long, we have acted as if Iraq was the biggest threat the U.S. faces. It is not, and it never was, and it has distracted us from real threats. Al Qaeda has capitalized on our obsession with Iraq by building new bases.Â
Obama understands that keeping troops bogged down in Iraq has more than one cost. Of course, there is the awful cost in human life. There is the enormous financial cost. But there is also the cost of inaction elsewhere. We have finite capabilities and all the time, energy, and military talent we focus on Iraq cannot, of course, be devoted to confronting the real threats we face elsewhere.
It’s in writing. Obama will end the war in Iraq, he will carefully and gradually withdraw and redeploy the troops over a 16 month period. He is not a pacifist: he understands that we face real threats in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Ending the war in Iraq will allow us to deal with these threats. McCain’s does not understand what staying in Iraq means, that there are other matters demanding our attention.  McCain knows only one approach in Iraq–stay the course. Stubbornness can be a necessary quality, but not when it blinds us to reality. It is well past time for common sense on Iraq. Obama offers common sense, McCain offers an open-ended commitment to keeping troops in Iraq, whether Iraqis want them there or not.
