Without question, Barack Obama entered office with a lot on his plate.
Given the upcoming elections, and how his campaign was built upon lofty promises, Obama’s decision to suddenly announce withdrawals of troops from Iraq seems both a bit too good to be true as well as a bit too much like he’s trying to appease the masses.
In his speech on Aug. 31, Obama announced that Operation Iraqi Freedom was over, and that the “Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.”
In March 2008, Obama gave a speech where he said that “the lesson of Iraq is that when we are making decisions about matters as grave as war, we need a policy rooted in reason and facts, not ideology and politics.”
It was during that same campaign that Obama stated he hoped to begin troop withdrawals by the end of that year, 2009. He would later change that date to the end of 2010, a date which he confirmed in his most recent speech.
The entire affair smells of window dressing, Obama meeting his quota. Our president letting the world know that, yes, he is still planning on meeting the arbitrary deadline he had set forth for troop withdrawals and that he just wants everyone to know this. And it’s all a few months before elections.
It’s an admirable decision, but not the most rational one: the entire conflict in Iraq will not end well or soon in any way, so besides pleasing the naysayers, withdrawing our troops would by all accounts be leaving a job unfinished.
“I have no illusions that any of this will be easy. But I do know that we can only begin to make these changes when we end the mindset that focuses on Iraq and ignores the rest of the world,” Obama said more than two years ago.
It all really boils down to what matters to the United States: our own wretched economy, our health care issues and our tax problems, or this big, hulking monster we’ve created and not subdued, looming in the Middle East.
“This completes a transition to Iraqi responsibility for their own security,” Obama said in his recent speech, “Of course, violence will not end with our combat mission. But ultimately, these terrorists will fail to achieve their goals,” he later added.
They’ll achieve their goals. Meanwhile, an unstable Iraqi government will be left in shambles.