So, President Obama is now at last willing to admit publicly that he doesn’t have a strategy in Iraq, after months of saying he did have a strategy. That he didn’t have a strategy is not news. Frankly, this has been the problem all along. Is that he is willing to admit it is, however, news.
Now, here at home, there’s only 19% of the American who think that Obama actually has a strategy, despite his admission according to the polls I’ve seen. The rest of us know, and have apparently known for some time that he doesn’t have a working strategy. You have to wonder about the thought processes of those 19% Who still believe that Obama is going to pull this one out. That he has a strategy at all, much less a working one.
His admission that he doesn’t have a strategy, is only a partial admission, in fact. What’s really been going on here is that his previous strategy didn’t work.
It’s far more politically expedient to claim that you don’t have a plan then it is to admit the plan you were dealing with, didn’t work, and in fact made things worse.
Its previous strategy was based on this stupidly misguided notion that he could train up the Iraqi army and get them to do their own fighting.
There’s several problems with this. The message of the history of the last ten or twelve years in Iraq is clear. The Iraqis fight well when we are at their side. Or, at least they did. They’re not fighting well now, after having been abandoned by this president. It comes down to an issue of trust on the part of the Iraqis. When W sent our troops over not only to train but also to fight, the Iraqis saw that we had resolve in the matter. We were genuinely there to help them, and they responded accordingly.
President Obama meantime, has walked away from America’s responsibilities in the region at what even he described this political need, and essentially turned the whole problem over to Iraq. Or, more correctly, to Iran. This is a foreign policy blunder of the first order, and it is in fact emblematic of what we’ve come to expect from this administration.
When Obama abandoned Iraq, Iraqi leadership saw the only way that they were going to be able to get anything accomplished was to lean toward Iran. And thus began purging everyone from the military forces of Iraq that was unsympathetic to Tehran.
So as a result we now have the Sunnis on the outs with both the US and the Iraqi government, abandoned, and we expect them to fight? By walking away from our responsibilities at political need, Obama not only squandered the blood and fortune that we invested in Iraq’s future, he also squandered any hope of regaining the trust of the Iraqi people. He’s thrown away that trust so effectively, that one really must wonder if that’s what he had in mind in the first place. That’s a trust that is key in all of this.
Obama knows that the situation is broken, it was broken by him, and he doesn’t see a clear way of repairing the situation. That’s a correct assessment. As a result of his bungling there really is no way to solve this situation. And so now he admits he doesn’t have a plan after all. What he doesn’t say is the reason he doesn’t have a plan now is that the one he originally thought to go with, the one he abandoned the Bush Doctrine to follow, was proven to be faulty at least.
We were warned when we first went into Iraq years ago by the Bush administration and by our military that this was going to be a generation long event. That once we went in there we have to stick to the plan for there to be any hope of it working. With Obama that strategy was sacrificed on the altar of his political need to satisfy his pacifist base and his stated desire to bring America down to the level of the rest of the world.
I submit that those actions have not served the cause of peace but rather the cause of war. It is little noted that Obama and his pacifists have in fact caused more military conflict, more military deaths, and more mayhem around the world in the last six years than both Bushes and Reagan combined. And yet Obama gets the Nobel Prize for Peace. The mind boggles.
It appears to me now that the only way this situation is going to be salvaged is with an even greater effort on the part of ourselves and our military at even greater cost of money and blood, all because Obama didn’t want to stick to the plan.
One wonders, in looking at the amount of purge is going on in the military with Obama as commander in chief, whether or not our military actually has the kind of people necessary to see that commitment through. frankly, I have my doubts anymore.
What has to happen first, however, is a repudiation of Obama policy.
