As for the most important thing the administration got wrong in 2011? Perhaps too predictably, I’ll venture Iraq. I don’t believe the president ever really had the intention of maintaining a significant American military presence there. Deep in his bones, he long ago resolved that the war was a huge blunder, a blot on America’s moral character and a dangerous distraction from the real threats and challenges facing the nation. No amount of progress on the ground could convince him otherwise, or wash clean the stain of the war’s original sin in his eyes. Obama’s mission from the get-go was to put Iraq into the nation’s rear-view mirror, a goal from which he never really wavered. The trick was to do it in a way that didn’t immediately sacrifice all the hard-fought gains of Bush’s surge, to create the prospect of a “decent interval” that would limit the potential for political blowback.
To placate those — especially among the military’s top brass — who saw the strategic sense in consolidating a long-term partnership, the president authorized, albeit belatedly, negotiations to extend the U.S. troop presence. But his heart was never in it. As had been the case from the beginning of his term when it came to les affaires d’Irak, the president’s involvement in the effort to get to “yes” was notable only for its absence. Anyone who’d ever spent any time working Iraq policy post-2003 could have told you from the start: A negotiation structured to limit the president’s personal engagement in the muck and the mire of shepherding a deal through was in fact a negotiation structured to fail. And so it did.
Iraqi leaders certainly sniffed out long ago that Obama viewed them as the bastard step-children of Bush’s failed policies, whom he hoped to kick to the curb at the first available opportunity. They knew he had no intention of ever taking any real risks for them. Predictably enough, when it came to the thorny issue of immunity for U.S. troops, they weren’t about to take any for him either.
Obama never bought into the arguments that the Iraq play was worth the candle: The chance to help consolidate a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian democracy in the heart of the Middle East. To maintain a long-term U.S. troop presence on the borders of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkey. To help fortify Najaf, home to a quietist school of Shia Islam that hangs like a theological sword of Damocles over the radicalism of Khomeini’s Iran. To build a strategic partnership with a country of 30 million people, which by dint of history, geography, culture, and oil wealth is destined to exert an inordinate influence on the future of one of the world’s most volatile and vital regions.
In short, the most full-throated version of the argument went, what a long-term U.S. troop presence had done to help turn Germany, Japan, and Korea into major strategic assets of the United States, the democratic powerhouses of Europe and Asia, it could also do in Iraq and the broader Middle East. Withdrawing all U.S. forces from any of those countries after only 8 years would have been to run intolerable risks. The same logic surely applied to Iraq — especially now that the U.S. presence could be sustained at dramatically reduced cost in blood and treasure.
Yet Obama would have none of it. Not even the immediate shadow of a fanatical Iranian regime on the verge of nuclear weapons, rapaciously eyeing Iraq’s spoils from its perch next door, could sway him from his course. On the contrary, his announcement of the U.S. withdrawal followed by just days the revelation of an Iranian plot to explode a large truck bomb in downtown Washington. A conspiracy to commit mass murder on American shores met by military retreat from Iran’s borders. Unfair? Of course. But an accurate portrayal of how events are perceived in the Middle East? For sure.
“General Petraeus was asked by obama to retire” an exerpt from the Generals biography to be released in Jan or February 2012; the protest by the General regarding the drawdown in Afghanistan against the advise of this military commander was met by disdain.
This fits in with his re-election campaign; he thinks bringing the troops home irrespective of consequences so much so as losing the war will help him to gain not only the military vote, but also to fullfill his plan to allow jihadist to take over the MiddleEast. The insider pegged this quite some time ago!
While the General decided against resigning to avoid political ramifications, at the end he retired due to the cinc’s request, and was transferred out of the military theater.Putting everything together, it is quite a pathetic situation, the result being, that nobody ever will trust us again.
Malicious intent, that’s the $64,ooo dollar question….
@cali: Petraeus resigning would have been Obama’s worst nightmare. It would have freed him up to run for POTUS in 2012 which was probably the underlying reason for appointing him as head of the CIA. Unlike Wesley Clark, he was a highly successful and respected general who would cream Obama in 2012.
Goodness me, Obama wouldn’t support the endlessly ambitious and costly schemes of neoconservatives. I can hear the world’s tiniest violin playing! It’s unfortunate that Americans will have to pay the price of their still-ongoing projects in grandiose world-improvement, but that’s democracy for you, I guess.
Bbart, don’t you have a meeting about the Bildergerger conspiracy to attend? Ron Paul believes it to be true and you have made your support of him clear. The fact you are a Ronulan will cost you much credibility. You’re probably too loony to see that tho.
Here’s an idea, move to a remote part of Alaska. That way the evil Rockefellers can’t get to you.