Barack Obama made a big deal out of John McCain‘s saying U.S. troops in Iraq were down to a pre-surge level when they aren’t — yet.
Combat troops are being reduced now and will be down to that number by the end of next month, if not support troops. The deal is done. Obama is technically correct, but misleading.
The slam at McCain is like saying Obama was concocting a bald-faced fabrication when he said an uncle of his helped liberate Auschwitz at the end of World War II. — it was actually Buchenwald — or picking on his intellectual prowess when he said he had visited 57 states.
That number really, honest to God, came out of his mouth. It happened for reasons of exhaustion on the campaign trail, I am sure, but, compared to McCain’s overstatement on troop withdrawal, is stratospherically dumbfounding.
The larger — and immensely more meaningful — Obama mistake lately was his pointing to Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon and John Kennedy as examples of presidents doing what he had pledged to do: meet enemy leaders such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran or Hugo Chavez of Venezuela without preconditions.
The facts have by now been well rehearsed by critics, most notably the columnist Charles Krauthammer. FDR and Truman did no such thing (the meetings with Josef Stalin don’t count because he was an ally at the time), Nixon’s meeting with Mao Tse Tung of China was elaborately prepared — there were all sorts of preconditions — and Kennedy’s meeting with Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union was disastrous. The Soviet boss apparently figured Kennedy was a weak-kneed amateur, and may thus have been emboldened to take steps leading to the Cuban missile crisis.
“It’s hard to see what such a summit with President Ahmadinejad would actually gain, except an earful of anti-Semitic rants, and a worldwide audience for a man who denies one Holocaust and talks before frenzied crowds about starting another,” McCain said recently as part of his attack on the extraordinary risk that would be entailed if a President Obama actually followed through with what candidate Obama has pledged. McCain has a better idea. Obama should go with him to Iraq to meet with General David Petraeus, the commanding general there.
McCain said the two should go this summer , but Obama — the candidate of change and hope, of doing things differently in politics, of collaboration instead of constant contest — called the proposal a political stunt. He did make it known that he had been considering a trip to Iraq without his opponent even as one spokesman also said a priori of any such trip that Iraq’s leaders had not made any political progress.
That’s simply wrong. In a highly complicated situation that looks to turn back mighty historical forces, there has in fact been political progress and quite stunning progress by the Iraqi army, which is currently stifling violence in Mosul on top of outstanding achievements in Basra and Sadr City. Conditions are improving to the point where significant U.S. troop withdrawals and redeployments might be possible sooner than once thought as a matter of a stabilizing strategy, not of an arbitrary, defeatist, overly hurried timetable of the sort Obama proposes, a schedule unrelated to the situation on the ground and the ability of our Iraqi allies to survive.
As a candidate of late, Obama has been reinventing history. If he becomes president, he will be making history, and the danger is that out of inexperienced naiveté, he will endanger national security by handing Iraq over to terrorists.
