In February, 2007, when Barack Obama declared that he was running for President, violence in Iraq had reached apocalyptic levels, and he based his candidacy, in part, on a bold promise to begin a rapid withdrawal of American forces upon taking office. At the time, this pledge represented conventional thinking among Democrats and was guaranteed to play well with primary voters. But in the year and a half since then two improbable, though not unforeseeable, events have occurred: Obama has won the Democratic nomination, and Iraq, despite myriad crises, has begun to stabilize. With the general election four months away, Obama’s rhetoric on the topic now seems outdated and out of touch, and the nominee-apparent may have a political problem concerning the very issue that did so much to bring him this far.
Which is why, I suppose, the ever-elastic Obama has grounded his once soaring promises of “immediate troop withdrawal.” Obama’s problem transcends the undeniable success of the surge. Post-Petraeus Iraq has factually challenged every narrative in his inventory. The surge won’t work. America has no business in the middle of a Sunni-Shia civil war. Prime Minister Maliki will never be able to achieve functional reconciliation. Iraq has nothing to do with the larger war on terrorism. And so the spin goes. The grandest Democratic talking point of them all, that Iraq has nothing to do with al-Qaeda, should be pure ear candy to McCain supporters. Beyond Bin Laden’s lingering operational defeat in Iraq, the surge has strategically beaten back radical Islam as a functional ideology. So not only has the recent successes in Iraq proven that Barack Obama’s Iraq policy is hopelessly behind the times, they’ve made McCain appear damn near clairvoyant. Sayeth McCain at the Virginia Military Institute in April of 2007:
However it ends, the war in Iraq will have a profound influence on the future of the Middle East, global stability, and the security of the United States, which will remain, for the foreseeable future, directly affected by events in that dangerous part of the world. The war is part of a broader struggle in the Arab and Muslim world, the struggle between violent extremists and the forces of modernity and moderation….. The war on terror, the war for the future of the Middle East, and the struggle for the soul of Islam – of which the war in Iraq constitutes a key element – are bound together. Progress in one requires progress in all.
HT – Goldfarb
