By Robert Tracinski

I promised in last Friday's edition that I would catch up soon on some grim news coming from Iraq and Afghanistan about the consequences of the Obama administration's hostility toward American interests, in matters big and small. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to follow through on that promise.

A little over a week ago, TIA Daily linked to a preview of Bob Woodward's new book on President Obama's war policy, and Jack Wakeland added the following comment:

"The information in Bob Woodward's book will take a little while to sink in. The book is going to be devastating to the president's current reputation as a reluctant warrior. It shows that he's refusing to engage in the one war that—back when he adamantly opposed the invasion of Iraq and the continuation of the war in Iraq—he claimed was the good war of the two; the 'war of necessity,' not the evil 'war of choice.' Woodward's book is going to show that Obama is against both types of wars. Obama is not an American warrior, reluctant or otherwise. He's an anti-American anti-warrior."

Well, it's starting to sink in.

Jack points out that late last week, "the Washington Post editorial board accused President Obama of giving up on the war in Afghanistan; of ignoring the military realities on the ground; of setting a withdrawal deadline based solely on the timing required to retain the support of Democratic Party loyalists for the kickoff of his 2012 re-election campaign." Here is how the Post put it:

What's most disturbing in Mr. Woodward's book is the evidence it offers that Mr. Obama's own commitment to his plan is weak. The president is described as preoccupied with finding "an exit strategy" that will reduce the US military involvement as quickly as possible. "This needs to be a plan about how we are going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan," Mr. Woodward quotes him as saying in one meeting.
Mr. Obama repeatedly cites the cost of the war and the need to shift resources to domestic priorities—though spending on Afghanistan is well below 1 percent of US gross domestic product. He is portrayed as citing purely political reasons for setting the deadline of July 2011 for beginning a withdrawal: "I can't lose all the Democratic Party," he is quoted as telling one senator....
Perhaps the most damning assessment of the president comes from Gen. Lute, who Mr. Woodward says concluded that "Obama had to do this 18-month surge just to demonstrate, in effect, that it couldn't be done...the president had treated the military as another political constituency that had to be accommodated."

Charles Krauthammer followed up with a blistering column condemning the president for lacking the will to fight in Afghanistan.

What kind of commander in chief sends tens of thousands of troops to war announcing in advance a fixed date for beginning their withdrawal? One who doesn't have his heart in it. One who doesn't really want to win but is making some kind of political gesture. One who thinks he has to be seen as trying but is preparing the ground—meaning, the political cover—for failure.
Until now, the above was just inference from the president's public rhetoric. No longer. Now we have the private quotes.

In looking over the revelations from Woodward's new book, I've been struck by a contrast no one else seems to have pointed out. I remember when the inside accounts came out about President Bush's decision to order the surge. The military kept handing him plans intended only to keep the lid on the violence in Iraq so that we could eventually negotiate some kind of "political settlement" and withdraw—and Bush instead insisted that he wanted a plan for how we were going to win in Iraq, which is what David Petraeus gave him.

Now we know that when Obama came into office, he met with the military—the military shaped by President Bush and by Petraeus's influence—and the roles were reversed. He kept asking the military to give him plans for how to withdraw from Afghanistan, and they kept giving him plans for how to win. Which he has rejected.

If Afghanistan is suffering from the president's indifference, even hostility, toward American success in war, what about the one military victory that was handed to Obama by the previous administration? He's doing his best to let that one slip away, too. If he seems content to lose the war in Afghanistan, Obama also seems content to lose the peace in Iraq.

Every military victory requires follow-through to maintain it—hence that old phrase about losing the peace. And that is especially true of counter-insurgency war, which tends to have a long tail end of continued violence and political maneuvering by hostile factions who may only have temporarily laid down their arms before they resume fighting. So after we ended our combat operations in Iraq, we still needed to maintain a vigorous diplomatic effort—backed by the subtle background threat of military force held in reserve—to establish a stable new government and protect it from being undermined. And that's precisely what President Obama has ignored.

An editorial at National Review Online gets the big picture right.

Obama came into office determined to declare the Iraq War over and come home. We engaged in a mad rush to go from 100,000 to 50,000 troops, which drastically decreased our leverage; at the same time we had a passive ambassador on the ground who was content to let events drift. Lately Joe Biden has been more involved, but our impatience for the Iraqis to finally form a government may have overwhelmed considerations about its composition. There are obviously limits to our control of Iraqi politics, but we should be using every possible instrument of persuasion to forestall the creation of a government that could be the predicate for renewed ethnic conflict.
The sacrifice of American troops during the surge bequeathed to President Obama a winnable war in Iraq. At this rate, we'll read in the next Woodward book all the details of how he let it slip away.

Jack Wakeland provides more updates on the specifics.

"Members of Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya Party"—this is the secular coalition that won a very narrow victory in Iraq's elections earlier this year—"are suffering disproportionately in a wave of murder by Iraq's political syndicates.

"This is the fruit of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's refusal to give up office after losing the election to Allawi's slate seven months ago. And the Obama administration hasn't lifted a finger to pressure Maliki to step down.

"It is a peculiar situation. Over 4,000 American servicemen and women died in order to help the Iraqi people establish a republic as a part of George W. Bush's 'Forward Strategy of Freedom.' Seven months ago Iraq had its first election since American forces withdrew from Iraq's cities. And now the American commander-in-chief is standing idle while a sectarian Shiite political syndicate tries to nullify the election results.

"Just as he ignored the Green Movement's valiant uprising against Iran's tyrannical system of velayat-e-faqih, President Obama is content to let the only republic in the Arab world die.

"President Obama will not take any action that might expand America's influence in the world; any action that might support adoption of the values of Western Civilization in the non-Western world."

The crisis may have been resolved in a compromise that has some good elements—and some very dangerous ones. Here is Jack again:

"Ayad Allawi has negotiated a deal to let Maliki illegally keep the prime minister's office—if Allawi can sit as president and the presidency is given real executive powers.

"It looks like al Maliki may accept this reduction in the power he continues to exercise even though his party lost the election, because he still gets to run the ministries and control and collect the majority of the graft: which has always been the real reason Maliki has been in government.

"The agreement would make Maliki head of the ministries—literally a 'prime minister'—while the presidency under Allawi would make the overall executive decisions in foreign policy and national defense. The proposal would also give the presidency power over state-run oil and gas production, keeping direct control of that critical organ of the Iraqi welfare state—the most corrupting aspect of Iraq's political system—out of the hands of the legislature. Presidential control is engineered to allow all of the Iraqi people to vote directly for the man who will give the orders on how to run the oil business and take it out of the direct control of the most powerful sectarian political bloc currently operating in Iraq, the Maliki-led Shiite block.

"In a proper "deal," al-Maliki would recognize the election results, step down, and allow Ayad Allawi to organize a coalition government. So this still is a bad deal which undermines constitutional rule. However, if the new presidential role is constitutionally codified, this deal would actually have some excellent results: a president who is elected independently of his political party; a mechanism that might place a man in the highest office of the land based on his leadership characteristics, even if the people give the majority control of the legislature to a party that opposes the president's own political party.

"This might make the Iraqi government look a tiny little bit more like the American system and a little bit less like a parliamentary system filled with MPs who were elected at-large, by party slate, with internal party power struggles determining who gets which slot how far up near the top of each party slate. This new approach would separate some of the legislative and executive powers, even if it doesn't answer the faction-busting need of electing members of parliament based on district, rather than by pecking order on party slates."

But now we get to the ominous part: "Muqtada al-Sadr played the role of go-between in the negotiations between Alawi and Maliki." Remember that it was Maliki who led the Iraqi government in an assault to take back the southern city of Basra and the Sadr City area of Baghdad from the control of Sadr's Iranian-backed Mahdi Army militia. But that was when President Bush's surge had shifted the political winds in our favor. Now that the winds from Washington have grown slack, leaving Iran to huff and puff and try to fill the vacuum, Maliki is wavering back.

As the NRO editorial notes, Sadr's "price for supporting Maliki is likely to include control of key ministries in the next government. The last time the Sadrists were given a measure of control over the instruments of state, they transformed them into tools to wage sectarian war against the Sunnis."

While we've all been watching the domestic policy battles of the past two years, there has been another shoe waiting to drop: the consequences of Obama's anti-American foreign policy. Let us hope it doesn't drop too hard—and that there is some way to limit the damage and recover when Obama is out of office in 2013.—RWT

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