One president gave his premature “Mission Accomplished” speech about Iraq on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Now another has given his own version as part of a Chicago-ward-politics sales pitch to disabled veterans.
The difference is that the first guy was sincere.
President Obama’s pork-barrel speech to the Disabled Veterans of America yesterday (if you want to help our vets, shut up and do it) would have drawn a blush from those Soviet propagandists who cropped purged Politburo members from Stalin-era photographs.
Ignoring his own opposition to the liberation of Iraq, supporting our troops and the surge, Obama spoke as if all’s well in Baghdad — thanks to him.
As part of his weird victory lap, the president rightfully praised the way “our troops adapted and adjusted” to the insurgency in Iraq, then stressed that 90,000 service members have come home during his administration.
He preened that we’ll meet his Aug. 31 deadline to transition “from combat to supporting and training Iraqi security forces” and reaffirmed that we’ll remove the last of our troops in 2012. But the portion of yesterday’s speech that focused on Iraq left out . . . Iraq.
While that country has passed its military crisis, it’s now in political turmoil — from which our government has utterly disengaged. We won that war, but we still can lose the peace. Obama shunned the fact that, almost half a year after its last national election, Iraq doesn’t have a new government. Determined to abandon “Bush’s war,” Obama’s been AWOL in Baghdad.
His neglect may prove disastrous. And the saddest aspect is that the Iraqis wanted us to step in and act as referees, to press them to get past their political differences.
The Iraqi elections were so close that both main camps claimed victory. In the macho atmosphere of Iraq, neither side could back down or compromise after that without an
excuse (“Those mean Americans made me do it!”). Our essential and dirt-cheap role would have been to hand the posturing parties a fig leaf.
We’ve seen this before, in the Balkans, where all sides wanted to stop fighting but were too macho to be the first to suggest a truce. When American troops arrived, they had their excuse. We just don’t get it that a key role for our soldiers and diplomats is to enable foreign parties to do what they already want to do themselves.
The situation in Iraq this year didn’t call for more troops. Those force reductions were fine. But after hearing for years about the supremacy of political over military solutions, it was odd to witness this administration’s neglect of basic statesmanship (which opened the door to the Iranians).
The problem is that this White House and its left-wing base now believe their own propaganda that Iraq was just a distraction, that Afghanistan’s all that matters.
So when his script reached the part about Afghanistan yesterday, the president spoke with the rhetoric of a warlord, insisting that “we are going on the offensive against the Taliban” and “we will disrupt, we will dismantle and we will ultimately defeat al Qaeda.”
Apart from sounding like George W. Bush (after extensive training by a public-speaking coach), it was noteworthy that, in the course of rattling his light saber, Obama didn’t mention his deadline for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan next year.
We’ll see how that one goes. Meanwhile, the really-big-booboo aspect of his speech was Obama’s utter refusal to acknowledge that Iraq matters to us at all, that it has any strategic value. Yet Iraq, not Afghanistan, lies at the heart of the Middle East, has a profound psychological grip on the Arab world, possesses a critical geo-strategic location — and, yes, has a lot of oil.
Even a sloppy, kinda-sorta, not-downright-awful outcome in Iraq improves the Middle East enormously. But all this administration cares about is getting out. We’re in danger of throwing away seven years of sacrifices — many made by those disabled veterans to whom Obama pandered — because our president won’t tell our diplomats to step up.
Sure, some on the left would delight in a belated disaster in Iraq to spite the long-gone bogeyman, George W. Bush. I do not believe President Obama is among them. He just doesn’t understand the stakes in Baghdad — and doesn’t want to.
But, then, he never has.
Ralph Peters’ latest book is “Endless War.”