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Curzon
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Curzon

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November 5th, 2008

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Someone fire this man from ever writing a column again, please

Run, Obama, Run!
October 27, 2006
By Charles Krauthammer

When just a week ago Barack Obama showed a bit of ankle and declared the mere possibility of his running for the presidency, the chattering classes swooned. Now that every columnist in the country has given him advice, here’s mine: He should run in ’08. He will lose in ’08.

…These are strong reasons for Obama to run. Nonetheless, he will not win. The reason is 9/11. The country will simply not elect a novice in wartime.

Comments to this entry

dj
November 5, 2008
6:37 am
Well in his defense, the issues have changed since then. Iraq has fallen off the radar and the economic issues have gotten bigger. That helped Obama.
Joe Jones
November 5, 2008
7:03 am
Kennedy was elected at the height of the Cold War, when the stakes were even bigger.
dj
November 5, 2008
7:46 am
Kennedy had some attributes that Obama does not. His service in the Navy specifically.

Also, the Cuban Missile Crisis was born out of the fact that the USSR thought they could push Kennedy around. Kennedy and his staff understood what a Navy was for and how to properly use it to project power and control the seas (an therefore almost everything).
Younghusband
November 5, 2008
7:49 am
Yes but the Russians didn't vote for Kennedy (unless you have some juicy cloak-and-dagger info for us).
Robert
November 5, 2008
9:45 am
In Chuck's defense, a lot of people have egg on their face right now...
tdaxp
November 5, 2008
11:05 am
Agreed with dj: because Bush shifted strategy in Iraq and adopted McCain's surge idea, Iraq fell off the radar and it was no longer a wartime election.
Just An Australian
November 5, 2008
11:46 am
Which is all silly. No one with any intelligence or awareness can really seriously believe that the surge worked (or is working) (well, at least, not by itself. It's a small part of a much bigger picture). I presume that the simple election-suitable narrative will now be rolled back in favor of a more sophisticated story that comes closer to the truth.

And it seems to me that faced with the unknown calm novice and the known lunatic that promised to continue with the standing policies, the public chose the novice. Hard to know which factors contributed more.
al j.
November 5, 2008
1:36 pm
"...at least not by itself."

That's the critical part. The SURGE strategy (not tactic)does deserve credit, but not all of it. To those of us paying attention, it's loosely symbolic and not fundamental to the shift in dynamics Iraq has been experiencing.

And yes, Krauthammer is a mook. I have family that name-drops him as a source for the political pulse. I tell them his commentary flatlines even before the rhetoric.
Ralph Hitchens
November 5, 2008
2:14 pm
Krauthammer, like his coreligionist Kristol, proves once again that being wrong, repeatedly, is no barrier to the op-ed pages of the mainstream media.
Chief Wiggum
November 6, 2008
3:01 am
"Which is all silly. No one with any intelligence or awareness can really seriously believe that the surge worked (or is working) (well, at least, not by itself..."

"Obama":http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/04/obama-surge-succeeded-beyond-wildest-dreams/ doesn't agree with you.

The troop surge in Iraq has been more successful than anyone could have imagined, Barack Obama conceded Thursday in his first-ever interview on FOX News' "The O'Reilly Factor."

As recently as July, the Democratic presidential candidate declined to rate the surge a success, but said it had helped reduce violence in the country. On Thursday, Obama acknowledged the 2007 increase in U.S. troops has benefited the Iraqi people.

"I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated," Obama said while refusing to retract his initial opposition to the surge. "I've already said it's succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."
Just An Australian
November 6, 2008
5:37 am
He didn't disagree with me. And I don't disagree with any of the words he said. It's what is not said where I might disagree with him - is it only the surge? Or was the surge just a part of a wider political process, and then, what now?
kende
November 9, 2008
9:39 am
No one with any intelligence would define the surge so narrowly. /end snark

The surge is a quick and functional way to describe the overall change in Iraq over the past 2 years. It isn't simply the increase in forces, the COIN strategy, the Anbar Awakening, or any of the other related shifts on their own. It is very hard however to see any one of those shifts occurring without the others.

Without American forces leading the way in providing security, with that increase in force strength being given new rules of engagement, a new mission (clear, hold, build), and being sent out pro-actively from their bases to be a near constant presense in the lives of Iraqis, I do not see how the Sunni tribes would have turned.

At any point during the past 2 years if tribes had chosen to shift to an anti-AQI position on their own, but received no military and financial support from the US, would they have fared any better than the South Vietnamese when we abandoned them? Or any better than the Shia uprising under Saddam, post Gulf War I?

Clearly, without the leadership, influence, tip gathering, and manpower of the Anbar sheiks there would have been no massive reduction in violence no matter how many troops the US surged in. Without the much larger Iraqi surge of forces (spoken of in many educated places as "the real surge"), it would have been hard to take the fight directly to AQI and the Mahdi militias at all... let alone with Iraqis increasingly in the lead or even running operations mostly themselves.

Could any of the political progress that has slowly taken place (with not much worse a track record than our own miserable Congress) been imaginable without the security gains that have been so dramatic that it's impossible for any honest, or intelligent, assessment of Iraq to deny?

Yes, even Obama finally admitted that the surge had succeeded beyond "anyone's wildest dreams". Of course if he had been reading Michael Yon, Michael Totten, Long War Journal, MESH, or Coming Anarchy maybe he'd have realized that some people weren't just dreaming this success over a year before he said this... they were documenting it.