Commentary on Iraq

Original article: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/wehner/15801

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So Obama was wrong about the surge. His predictions about it were wrong. Ok, we got that straight.

Why have we stopped talking about how we got into the war in the first place? Remember the reason stated by the Bush administration was to get rid of their WMDs. It has been revealed by numerous nonpartisan studies including the Iraq Study Group that the “evidence” and “intelligence” cited by the administration was a sham. The British report about Nigerien uranium was not, as claimed, given to us as solid evidence.

So then, after that was exposed, Bush tried to tie them to 9/11. Again, deliberate misleading of the American people. No connection at all. Al Qaeda was based in…oh, Afghanistan? That’s a whole Iran away from Iraq. The meeting between that Iraqi official and Al Qaeda operatives in the Czech Republic? Sham. Al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq prior to the war. Saddam (fiercely secular) would have had nothing to do with fundamentalist Islamists. Fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here? How about fighting them in Afghanistan (instead of telling our Afghan allies to let Osama escape at Tora Bora) so we don’t have to fight them anywhere?

And once we wise up to the lack of Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, you’d think Bush would have run out of tricks but no, we’re “bringing freedom to the Iraqis”. Oh the Iraqis are overjoyed by their newfound freedom, so happy that they give us these things that explode and kill our troops!

The idea that because we’re already in Iraq, we might as well act like it wasn’t Bush’s fault and criticize Obama for making a wrong judgement regarding the war (he’s not even a military expert for crying out loud, how are we supposed to hold him to the same standards as a president who has countless generals to help him make him decisions?), is completely ridiculous. Unlike Bush, whose administration ostracized generals like Eric Shinseki for giving realistic estimates of several hundred thousand troops needed in Iraq, Obama by his “flip-flop” in fact shows a willingness to listen to commanders on the ground and an ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Call it what you will, but he has done what McCain challenged him to do, go to Iraq and speak with commanders. Obama has done exactly that, and now is being criticized for “flip-flopping” when what he did was exactly what a president would have to do-seek advice from commanders before making decisions.

Again, the argument that the Iraq War has led to a defeat for Al Qaeda is terribly misleading. There would have been no Al Qaeda in Iraq to defeat if we had not invaded and provided 140,000 targets for budding jihadists to shoot at. If we had sent a ground force into Afghanistan when we had Osama holed up in Tora Bora instead of dropping bombs that couldn’t reach the entrenched terrorists, our troops may have returned home triumphantly from Afghanistan having completed their mission of annihilating the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.

I give John McCain credit for having the wisdom to see that the initial phases of the war were a complete disaster, and that more troops would be needed to quell the violence. I honor his wartime service as a pilot and his suffering as a PoW. But I still cannot reconcile myself to his support for an unjustified war in the first place.

Obama may have been wrong about the surge (implemented years after Shinseki’s original recommendations of much higher troop levels), but he was right about the most important decision-the one that landed us in war in the first place. To suggest that a wrong stance on the surge is more damning than misleading the country into war in the first place, that is blindness to reality. And to erase President Bush’s previous blunders because he implemented a plan that worked after years of failure? That is blindness to reality.

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It may certainly have benefited much of the Iraqi population to get rid of Saddam. In fact, if we manage to keep things going the way they are and leave Iraq a stable democracy (which I, a Democrat and Obama supporter, sincerely hope we do, we may look back years from now and see the Iraq War as having positive long term effects after all. I sincerely hope that is true.

However, no amount of good news from Iraq can erase the fact that Bush simply lied us into war. Let me remind you that our stated purpose was not to remove Saddam from power and free the Iraqis, it was to find WMDs that our administration told us were in Iraq, when they knew they had no evidence to back it up. If Bill Clinton can get impeached for lying about an affair (which really only directly affected three people-he, Monica Lewinsky, and Hillary Clinton), then why does Bush get off the hook for lying about a war that has caused the deaths of upwards of 4,000 brave American troops, several thousand more wounded and psychologically traumatized, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis? I challenge anyone who supported the Clinton impeachment as well as President Bush to think that through and come up with a valid response. Please email me or comment on my blog, this post will be there.