Come Home, America

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FEATURE ARTICLE

Obama Steals Bush's Achievement to Argue for McGovern's Foreign Policy

by Robert Tracinski

You get what you deserve, in the long run, and boy is Obama getting it. He gives a speech about the one thing in his presidency that has gone well so far—the winding down of the war in Iraq—and it is overshadowed by a debate over whether he's stealing credit for an achievement that actually belongs to his predecessor.

Actually, there is a lot of discussion about this, but not much debate, because everyone knows that George Bush's decision to order the "surge" is what won the war in Iraq and made it possible for us to end official combat operations there, leaving only small remnants of the insurgency for the Iraqis to mop up and suppress. Asked about whether Bush deserves credit, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was reduced to series of evasive answers worthy of Baghdad Bob. But even his boss doesn't dispute the basic facts.

In his speech last night—if you were searching for it—Obama had this to say about how the war was won:

The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given. They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people. Together with Iraqis and coalition partners who made huge sacrifices of their own, our troops fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future. They shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people; trained Iraqi security forces; and took out terrorist leaders. Because of our troops and civilians—and because of the resilience of the Iraqi people—Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain.

"Fighting block by block," "shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people," and "trained Iraqi security forces"—these are indirect references (so indirect as to be hidden) to the counter-insurgency strategy implemented by the "surge." And Obama acknowledges that these missions have been "completed"—the euphemism he uses to avoid uttering the phrase "mission accomplished." He is afraid of uttering it, not because he is afraid of criticism from the right, but because that phrase has been pilloried for years by his own supporters on the left.

So if the mission in Iraq has been, er, "completed," who deserves the credit for it? Why Barack Obama, of course! He won't give credit for victory to his political predecessor, and he even denies the word "victory" to our troops, but he has time to offer up this absurd little victory lap for himself:

This was my pledge to the American people as a candidate for this office. Last February, I announced a plan that would bring our combat brigades out of Iraq, while redoubling our efforts to strengthen Iraq's security forces and support its government and people. That is what we have done.

You may remember what Obama actually said "as a candidate for this office": that the surge would not work, was not working, and had not worked. He spent the whole campaign denying it. And as for the plan he "announced" for withdrawing troops—he was merely administering a drawdown schedule laid out in the "status of forces" agreement negotiated by President Bush.

I think just about everyone is now figuring out the shallow vanity of Barack Obama. Everything has to be about him and about how his campaign promises are the reason we won the war and how he deserves all the credit and how we should give him more power and authority to run everything.

Here's how far it has gone. I've actually started seeing bumper stickers with George Bush's visage, asking "Miss Me Yet?" And at least in one crucial swing state, they do. In a recent poll, Ohio voters preferred Bush to Obama by 50-42.

I don't pine for the return of George Bush; only liberals are doing that these days. Those of us on the right are pining for someone better.

But there are certain things we do miss about Bush. There was a self-deprecation that actually indicated self-confidence. He was a guy whose idea of blowing his own horn was to say that he was "misunderestimated"—a boast leavened by a joke aimed at his own misuse of the language. Obama, by contrast, is so insecure that he has to keep reminding us how great he is. And beneath that, there was always a sense of the decorum of his position and his office and the need, on certain occasions, to stay scrupulously above politics and partisanship. On an occasion like this, Bush would have been certain to share credit wherever he could with his predecessors and the opposition, and to leave domestic politics out of a foreign policy address.

Obama, by contrast, decided that what he really wanted this speech to be about was his partisan domestic agenda.

If he was stealing the accomplishment of George W. Bush, he was doing so in order to promote the foreign policy of George McGovern. When I heard Obama say, of the departure of the Army's Fourth Stryker Brigade from Baghdad that it was "just a convoy of brave Americans, making their way home," it reminded me of McGovern's 1972 campaign slogan, "Come Home, America," his call for America to retreat from the world and focus instead on imposing socialism at home.

That was the real meaning of Obama's description, at the end of the speech, about how we need to bring the troops home so we can spend money and effort on the economy, instead.

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we have not done what is necessary to shore up the foundation of our own prosperity. We have spent over a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has shortchanged investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.

This is totally dishonest. The Congressional Budget Office puts the total cost of the Iraq War at $709 billion—which is somewhat less than Barack Obama's failed "stimulus" bill. Which means that Obama spent more money—and added more to the deficit—in his first few weeks in office than George Bush did during the entire course of the Iraq War.

But still Obama plows forward with a call for more funding for "education"—i.e., a second stimulus package to subsidize state government employees, particularly education bureaucrats. He calls for money to "jump-start industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil," which means more "green jobs" boondoggles. He wants us to "unleash innovation" and "nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs," which means—well, I have no idea what it means, because there is nothing in Obama's agenda that is plausibly directed at that goal.

Politically, this is a disaster. David Freddoso sardonically describes the apparent reasoning behind the speech: "Just set aside the one last issue on which voters probably agree with you, and talk about the one where they've stopped trusting you."

But the real problem is that Obama's speech showed he does not have enough interest in foreign policy—and in American victory in war—to put in the effort to understand the surge, learn its real lessons, and apply them to Afghanistan. Thus, he describes the purpose of the Afghan surge in this way: "As with the surge in Iraq, these forces will be in place for a limited time to provide space for the Afghans to build their capacity and secure their own future." This is a good description of the Rumsfeld-Casey strategy that the US followed before the surge, where the purpose of US military action was to do just enough to keep the lid on Iraq while the real action was diplomatic negotiation toward a "political reconciliation." The lesson of Iraq was that political reconciliation came as a consequence of putting sufficient force onto the battlefield to convince everyone that you're going to win, so they'd better accommodate themselves to the winning side.

And most troubling, Obama continues to waffle about an American withdrawal from Afghanistan:

[N]ext July, we will begin a transition to Afghan responsibility. The pace of our troop reductions will be determined by conditions on the ground, and our support for Afghanistan will endure. But make no mistake: this transition will begin—because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people's.

But war is always an open-ended commitment. It is inherently uncertain—particularly since the enemy is trying everything he can think of to frustrate all of our plans. To say that you're going into a war without an open-ended commitment is a bit like saying you're going into a marriage without an open-ended commitment: it sends the message that you're likely to bail out the moment things don't go well.

That's why John McCain, who advocated the "surge" long before Obama even got around to declaring that it would fail, is right when he says that "the surge worked because it was clear that success was the only exit strategy." I don't pine for the lost McCain presidency, either—except on issues relating to war and foreign policy.

But as for Obama, well, he's got a lot on his plate, what with all of the terrific work he's been doing making sure we have a strong "recovery summer." And at this rate, we'll still be working on that recovery—it'll be right around the corner any minute—in July of next year, so don't take too seriously any promises he makes about what he'll do in Afghanistan.

We may yet win the war in Afghanistan. I believe that we can, despite our errors, because we are so strong and the enemy is so weak. But President Obama will have the same problem with any future success of the Afghan surge as he is having with the success of the Iraqi surge. Everyone will know that it happened despite his leadership, not because of it.

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