The man himself has a comment on candidate Barack Obama in the Atlantic blog:
As conditions in Iraq improve, Barack Obama has yet to adjust his proposed strategy for managing conflict in the region.
Like Sen. Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates strongly doubted the wisdom of invading Iraq. Gates was a member of the Iraq Study Group, which, except for a throw-away sentence about a temporary surge of forces in Baghdad, was inclined to withdraw our forces from combat operations back in 2006. Therefore, when Gates became defense secretary, many assumed he would push for a retreat from our commitment to the Baghdad government. But he did the opposite. He aggressively prosecuted the war, fired his combatant commander for Central Command (who was less enthusiastic than Gates about winning in Iraq) and Air Force chief (who wasn’t getting UAVs to the battlefield fast enough). Gates, who initially opposed the war, is fighting it with more gusto than his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who supported the invasion.
This is not uncommon. Army Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker were likely not avid supporters of the invasion either, but both are now working not just to get America out of Iraq with our honor intact, but to win there. Sen. John McCain, who was cool to both the insertion of forces in Bosnia and the war in Kosovo in the 1990s, was vigorously in favor of winning those conflicts once troops were committed on the ground.
There is a lesson here for Barack Obama.
Obama was against the Iraq War and can forever claim credit for foreseeing its difficulties. Still, he may soon be in the same position as Gates, Petraeus, and Crocker — that is, with bureaucratic responsibility for getting the best possible result out of our 2003 invasion. And Obama will not be alone: Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski have been saying repeatedly how disastrous the war has turned out to be. Obama, Albright, and Brzezinski are still acting as if the war was lost long ago, even as Gates, Petraeus, and Crocker have gradually, painstakingly turned it into a war that will be the Democrats’ to lose.
The Democrats may well be right that the invasion was a strategic mistake that cost us greatly both in the Middle East and in the rest of the world. But their dire predictions from two years ago don’t look very good in hindsight. And so they need to start thinking constructively about Iraq, not destructively. To wit, as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage — another opponent of the war — has said, the United States will be known and remembered as much by how it got out of Iraq as by how it got in. Armitage is thinking constructively in a way that Obama and company need to.
Obama can and should keep reminding voters about how he opposed the war from the beginning. But the less inclined he is to close the distance between what he will do next in Iraq and what Sen. John McCain will do next, the greater is the possibility that Iran will take advantage of the policy gap between the two candidates. McCain is publicly committed to staying the course that Gates and Petraeus have set the United States military on in Iraq. Obama is committed to getting all the troops out by 2010 no matter what. A precipitous withdrawal may be the last chance the Iranians will have to dominate Iraq to the degree that they had thought possible in 2006. If Obama heads into the fall campaign without visiting Iraq, without acknowledging progress there, and without altering his time-table for withdrawal, the Iranians may decide to help his electoral chances by initiating a new spate of bombings.
In other words, the closer we get to the election, the more consequences Obama’s public position may have for events on the ground in Iraq. And Obama’s position can surely evolve in a direction that acknowledges the need to stay tough there, even as he continues to claim credit for having been against the project from the beginning. Rather than blur the distinction between him and McCain, he can subtly shift on Iraq in a way that demonstrates just how serious a thinker he is on foreign policy.
Every email I get from troops deployed in Iraq talks about the improved situation on the ground. Obama should be aware that they think it is far from a lost cause.
I wouldn’t expect Obama to change his stance before the election. After assuming office, maybe. But whether or not Iraq is getting better, anti-war sentiment is still high and the anti-war crowd is one of Obama’s key constituencies.
You remember how they skewered Kerry for being a “flip-flopper” four years ago… think Obama wants to go down that road?
I think he’s smart enough to take a pragmatic approach once he’s in office, but he just can’t risk looking like a feather at this point. Better to deal with it in 2012, when hindsight would allow him to say “No, it wasn’t what I promised, but it was the right choice.”
if “the Iranians … decide to help his electoral chances by initiating a new spate of bombings,” doesn’t play into joschka fischer’s ‘october surprise?’
It will be interesting to see. For now I take Obama at his surrender-promising word. For people of his ilk, the destruction of American power and prestige that a humiliating defeat and retreat would entail is a feature, not a bug.
I do hope Obama discovers a lost sense of morality and patriotism sometime between now and his coronation, but I won’t hold my breath.
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I’m with Joe on this. One of the biggest arguments in Obama’s candidacy has been that he had the foresight to realize what a fiasco the war would be, and to oppose it from before the start. Changing his message now would probably be disaster for his ability to distinguish himself from McCain on this issue, even if he is privately considering a more “pragmatic” strategy after the election.
As for Jim’s silly comment, I believe America prestige and military power has in fact already been rather shattered by the current campaign, and leaving aside the question of whether withdrawal from Iraq would be either good for Iraq or good for American security, it would certainly do a lot to repair both the military’s ability to respond to other conflicts, and even more to repair the US’s international standing.
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