I've thought that for quite some time - at least on foreign policy. Charles Krauthammer agrees:
What the president did note with some pride, however, is that beyond preventing a second attack, he is bequeathing to his successor the kinds of powers and institutions the next president will need to prevent further attack and successfully prosecute the long war. And indeed, he does leave behind a Department of Homeland Security, reorganized intelligence services with newly developed capacities to share information, and a revised FISA regime that grants broader and modernized wiretapping authority.
In this respect, Bush is much like Truman, who developed the sinews of war for a new era (the Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA), expanded the powers of the presidency, established a new doctrine for active intervention abroad, and ultimately engaged in a war (Korea) — also absent an attack on the U.S. — that proved highly unpopular.
So unpopular that Truman left office disparaged and highly out of favor. History has revised that verdict. I have little doubt that Bush will be the subject of a similar reconsideration.
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said Thursday that the escalation of U.S. troops in Iraq, which he had opposed, has succeeded in reducing violence "beyond our wildest dreams."
Obama constantly touts his judgement as one of the prime qualities that he would bring to the office of President. But on the most important issue of the time, at the time that it was most important to make a good judgement, he made a terribly, terribly bad judgement:
“To reach such a solution, we must communicate clearly and effectively to the factions in Iraq that the days of asking, urging, and waiting for them to take control of their own country are coming to an end.” This is the most absurd point of all. The Iraqis didn’t have enough trained and seasoned security forces to bring stability. Retreat would not have forced them to work together — it would have forced the factions to arm themselves and go to war to protect themselves. The central government needed more time to develop the means to “take control of their own country”, and in 2008 we have seen the results.
McCain and Bush made the right call in supporting the Surge. The irony of the situation now is that the gains that we have made through the Surge have made Obama's withdrawal plans feasible, instead of crazy - as they were when he started advocating them - in other words, the rightness of McCain and Bush ultimately allow Obama to seem more reasonable, and thus, electable. That's a shame.
BARACK OBAMA yesterday accused President Bush and Sen. John McCain of rigidity on Iraq: "They said we couldn't leave when violence was up, they say we can't leave when violence is down." Mr. Obama then confirmed his own foolish consistency. Early last year, when the war was at its peak, the Democratic candidate proposed a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces in slightly more than a year. Yesterday, with bloodshed at its lowest level since the war began, Mr. Obama endorsed the same plan. After hinting earlier this month that he might "refine" his Iraq strategy after visiting the country and listening to commanders, Mr. Obama appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq.
At some point, Democrats decided that facts didn’t matter anymore in Iraq. And they nominated just the man to reflect the party’s new anti-factual consensus on the war, a Barack Obama who has fixedly ignored changing conditions on the ground.
It’s gotten harder as the success of the surge has become undeniable, but — despite some wobbles — Obama is sticking to his plan for a 16-month timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. He musters dishonesty, evasion and straw-grasping to try to create a patina of respectability around a scandalously unserious position.
Let me be crystal clear: if elected president, my first act will be to call for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq. I have always been consistent and forthright in this position, and I want to reassure my supporters that my recent statement backtracking from it was just some bullshit my staff came up with to tack to the center for the general election. To win this election, it will be critical to appeal to the dwindling but stubborn group of idiots who cling to fantasies of American "victory" in this tragic disaster. It's an unfortunate part of the complicated game of presidential politics, but let's face it: I can't stop this war if I'm not in the White House. However, you should know by now that whatever I may say from now until November, once elected I will immediately pull the rug from these gullible pro-war rubes.
While Democrats in the Senate have placated Lieberman since his 2006 re-election so he would caucus with them and thus allow them to maintain their one-seat majority, no such placating will be necessary in January 2009 when the Democrats are likely to control the Senate by a comfortable margin. And if that occurs, their supposedly "opportunistic" friend Joe Lieberman will likely be replaced as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. "Opportunistic" Joe will be a man without a home with little power to influence anything.
Despite attempts to defame him, Joe Lieberman is no turncoat or opportunist. He is a statesman who has made a politically risky decision that he believes is in the best interest of the country. He is a profile in political courage.
Expert and elite opinion swung behind the Baker-Hamilton report, which called for handing more of the problems off to the Iraqi military and wooing Iran and Syria. Republicans on Capitol Hill were quietly contemptuous of the president while Democrats were loudly so.
Democratic leaders like Senator Harry Reid considered the war lost. Barack Obama called for a U.S. withdrawal starting in the spring of 2007, while Senator Reid offered legislation calling for a complete U.S. pullback by March 2008.
The arguments floating around the op-ed pages and seminar rooms were overwhelmingly against the idea of a surge — a mere 20,000 additional troops would not make a difference. The U.S. presence provoked violence, rather than diminishing it. The more the U.S. did, the less the Iraqis would step up to do. Iraq was in the middle of a civil war, and it was insanity to put American troops in the middle of it.
When President Bush consulted his own generals, the story was much the same. Almost every top general, including Abizaid, Schoomaker and Casey, were against the surge. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was against it, according to recent reports. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki called for a smaller U.S. presence, not a bigger one.
In these circumstances, it’s amazing that George Bush decided on the surge. And looking back, one thing is clear: Every personal trait that led Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war led him to make a successful decision when it came to this crucial call.
The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt renders a valuable service by wading through last week’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report which ostensibly flogs the “Bush Lied” theme, but in fact reports that Pres. Bush’s statements on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, chemical weapons, biological weapons, production capability and mobile laboratories, weapons of mass destruction overall, ballistic missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda were all substantiated by the available intelligence...
Forget the facts. Any political or military gains in Iraq, according to Obama, are only “tactical.”
Obama does not even go to Iraq for two years (he went once for two days in 2006), nor does he receive individual briefings from General Petraeus. He has already determined that whatever the success of the U.S. and Iraqi forces in Sadr City and Basra, whatever the performance of the Iraqi army, and whatever the level of violence, we have already been defeated and must leave immediately.
In rejecting John McCain’s invitation for a joint visit to Iraq, Obama’s spokesman declared that “we don’t need any more ‘Mission Accomplished’ banners or walks through Baghdad markets to know that Iraq’s leaders have not made the political progress that was the stated purpose of the surge.” No word on why the passage of key political benchmarks doesn’t qualify as “political progress.” In short, facts don’t matter.
The WaPo calls this a tragic and catastrophic failure of intelligence by the CIA. It should also say forthrightly that this entire line is a tragic and catastrophic failure of intelligence by the Democratic Party, who have had no coherent terrorism policy since 9/11 except to parrot MoveOn.org's stupidest sloganeering.
Senator Obama’s statements on Iraq are representative of his larger weaknesses. If you strip away the eloquence, charm, and political skills and drill down on the substance, Obama is, especially when it comes to Iraq, misinformed and seemingly out of his depth. He continued to make claims that are demonstrably wrong–and perhaps the media, many of whom are utterly enchanted with the Obama candidacy, will begin to hone in on how out of touch with reality he is. We are, after all, electing a president and not a high school prom king. Obama’s lack of knowledge on issues like Iraq should matter more than his ability to excite a crowd and charm reporters. And his steadfast refusal to alter his views based on new, and in this instance encouraging, evidence is more evidence of the enormous gap that exists between who Obama is and how he presents himself to be. On Iraq, Barack Obama is in a state of denial.
I forget who it was who noted this, but it's a brilliant point. During WWII, Japan's government and media always claimed Japan was winning every single battle. But careful listeners could divine the way the War in the Pacific was really going by noting the locations of each of these "victories" -- each of these "victories" seemed to be occurring closer and closer to the Japanese mainland.
In a near-exact reversal of that situation, the American media laments each and every American "defeat"... but careful readers will note that the "Zone of Quagmire" seems to be radiating farther and farther out from US power centers and closer and closer to the heart of Al Qaeda/insurgent/Sadrist control.
We began by losing in Fallujah so badly our troops now say there are weeks that go by without hearing a gun shot. It's quiet there -- too quiet.
We then lost Baghdad catastrophically. You can tell we lost because there are so few reports of mortar attacks hitting the Green Zone. The enemy won there by moving further and further out from the city. You know -- surrounding us.
We then lost in Basra so dreadfully it apparently simply vanished from the map entirely, perhaps sucked into another dimension through an interplanar vortex.
Next up we lost in Sadr's last bastion of power -- the slum he's named for -- which you can see by fact that the Iraqi Army is now patrolling the streets and conducts house-to-house searches for weapons. But we lost, because two concessions were made to the Sadrists -- "light weapons" (pistols, rifles) could be kept, one per person, and no US troops would accompany the IA. That last point really stung us, because you know our boys are heartbroken that the IA gets the glamor duty of patrolling this slum. Glory denied.
And now we're losing in Mosul, of course.
If we lose in Iraq, it's going to be because the left decided that they wanted to.
Al Qaeda in Iraq is pretty close to dead, according to al Qaeda in Iraq. Hence, it's the perfect time to elect the guy who wants to pull out of Iraq and reinvigorate al Qaeda in Iraq! Because if we don't have a war to protest, the lefties will all have to get rid of those cool "endlessthis war" bumper stickers.
What we have is jihadists virtually conceding defeat, while the leading Democratic candidate for president essentially campaigns on a way to turn that defeat into a victory by removing the obstacles to jihadi success.
To which I say, keep your chin up, al Qaeda in Iraq! After all, O! is promising hopeyness and changitude! — though for a while there, he had me convinced he was directing that message at the US electorate.
Instead, turns out he’s just pitching it toward our adversaries and the uninformed here at home — and of course, to those who feel that shows of US military strength are just part and parcel of an unsavory US international hegemony, one that needs to be thwarted so that we’ll learn our lesson about crass interventionalism (defined as interventionalism in our own national interests, rather than the kind that smacks of showy altruism); stick to ourselves, culturally speaking; and concentrate on important things, like how best to have the government regulate our thermostats, our medical care, our eating habits, etc., as well as how best to “put every American to work” in the service of the State — a small offering, if you will, to the Secular Godhead and His cult of personality.
