WHY TODAY IS EVEN BETTER THAN YESTERDAY
This entry was posted on 1/21/2009 9:29 AM and is filed under uncategorized.
"I intend to end this war. My first day in office, I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war responsibly and deliberately but decisively."
--President Barack Obama, said repeatedly over the course of a two-year campaign
"I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is a cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and hardships borne."
--President Barack Obama, October 2002, at the outset of his campaign for U.S. Senate. (Taped across my computer monitor, where I see it every day.)
He said it from the very beginning.
Remember--to oppose the war in 2002, especially in a hard-fought campaign for the U.S. Senate dominated by a Republican majority--was to be assaulted as unpatriotic, as not supporting the troops, even--in some quarters--as being treasonous.
Remember, Max Cleland, who left half his body behind in Viet Nam, was defeated in his re-election campaign for the senate in 2002 by a chickenhawk right-winger who accused him of not being patriotic enough. Why? Because he opposed the war.
But after Barack Obama got elected to the Senate, and from the time he declared for the presidency in February of 2007, he kept saying it.
He said it when he was 30 points down and nobody--nobody--thought he had a snowball's chance in hell of beating the Clinton Machine.
He said it when they accused him of being not-quite-American, of being a radical extremist who coddled terrorists, of being too young and inexperienced and foolish to understand the ways of modern warfare.
He said it when they accused him of wanting to "cut and run," when they said he was a closet Muslim plotting to secretly overthrow the American government.
He said it when he was neck-and-neck in a race for the presidency with a war-hero who paraded his prisoner-of-war status as the single most important qualification for anyone running for commander-in-chief--a status slobberingly adored by an enamored media.
And then, when he got elected, they said that, NOW, now that he was getting the same daily Intelligence briefings as the president, why, he would GET that we just could not do what he kept saying we needed to do.
But he still said it. In fact, he said, (paraphrased), "I'm getting the same Intelligence briefings as the president does, every day, and so far I have not seen anything that tells me our plans need to change."
In his Inaugural address, he said it again.
And today, his first day in office, when all the pundits said he'd hit the ground running on domestic issues and the economy and nothing else, guess who he is meeting with?
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of Iraqi forces, Gen. David McKiernan, commander of Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, top military commander of the Middle East. (Odierno and McKiernan will videoconference but Petraeus is flying in for the meeting.)
He said he would do it.
He said it when everybody said he was crazy, but he said it.
And today, at long last, he IS doing it.
There are those who shrug and say, So what? The Iraqis themselves have put a limit on how long U.S. troops can remain in their country.
Yeah? And when did they work up the nerve to do THAT?
When it became clear that Barack Obama would most likely be the next president of the United States.
The Bush administration built a massive, behemoth, half-billion dollar American embassy in Baghdad--an obscene middle-finger to the Middle East. The largest embassy in the world, it was clear that the Imperial Presidency intended to leave not just a footprint in Iraq, but the whole foot.
Meanwhile they constructed numerous American military bases so enormous that they were the size of entire cities, with golf courses and malls.
They never intended to leave; in fact, I have long suspected that Donald Rumsfeld's famous shrug and retort, "Stuff happens," when the looting of Iraq began and the chaos and insurgencies had their birth--was deliberate.
If they could dismantle the Iraqi government and stand back while the nation melted down, their presence as a national police force and Big Brother shadow-government would be assured for decades to come, while in the meantime, Exxon-Mobile and their cronies made off with the black gold buried beneath the desert sands.
Cost in American blood and treasure was irrelevant to the bottom line: oil.
Six years later the American military is staggering and broken, half its materiel in need of serious repair and replacement, its personnel abused and exhausted by constant, repeated deployments. Divorce, suicide, child abuse, cases of PTSD--even less-measured statistics like the amount of troops who die in motorcyle accidents between deployments--have mounted to unprecedented levels as less than one-half of one-percent of the American population fights this Goundhog Day war over and over and over again.
And there's a whole other war going on in Afghanistan. Some get the privilege of fighting in BOTH wars. Repeatedly.
The truth is that Maliki would never have had the balls to send troops into Basra and otherwise put his stamp on bringing order into his country if he had thought we were going to be there forever. This is because their army and police force has been woefully inept, underfunded, undersupplied, undertrained, and corrupt.
They were only too happy to let the Americans do all the heavy lifting. Bodyguards for the Iraqi people.
Then Barack Obama, like a bolt of lightning, flashed into the scene, and everything changed.
The Iraqis realized that we really were going to pull out, in spite of the huge bases and the gigantic embassy, and the shock and awe of it pulled them up short, made them realize they'd better step up or there really would be a civil war when the Americans left.
This took place at the same time that the Sunnis got tired of al Qaeda raping their daughters and beheading their sheiks up in the Anbar province, and they decided to let the Marines help them regain control of their region.
All of this took place in the past two years, and although the media is damned and determined to give Bush's lame "surge" the credit, it is not the bottom-line reason for the changes in Iraq.
The changes in Iraq happened because the Iraqi people finally realized that they were going to have the opportunity to take their country back, and when they realized that, they stepped up.
There are many anti-war activists who will not be pleased with the steps Obama takes to end this war. They want him to load up 100% of the troops on supersonic jets and get them the hell out of there. NOW.
But it doesn't work that way.
For one thing, we can't leave all those tanks and munitions and arms behind. And it will take AT LEAST 16 months to get most of it out.
For another, when troops pull out of a war-torn country, they are at their gravest risk for attack. There need to be enough combat troops around to protect the support troops as they make the slow drive out of the country with all those armored personnel carriers and Humvees and artillery.
Also, we will be leaving some troops behind. I know many people who think we should get them all out, but the truth is that Iraq still needs our help in maintaining some level of peace and commerce in their streets. Bombings still occur every day, and their army is still at a loss without the support of American troops in the background, providing Intelligence, artillery, crucial medical help, advice, and so on.
They're getting better, but it's going to take some time.
And finally, although I opposed this war from the beginning, as did the president and many millions more people, the fact is that the blood of well over 4000 of our boys and girls has been spilled in that miserable country, and that is not counting the tens of thousands who left behind arms and legs and sanity, and thousands more who died in ways not counted by the military--like Humvee accidents, suicides, friendly fire incidents, illness, and so on.
Many of the troops who have had multiple deployments have gotten to know the Iraqi people better than they did in the early kick-down-doors days. They have come to care for them, and they don't want to suddenly pull out their support and leave them to more chaos. They would like to see them learn to stand on their own and be, well, what passes in the Middle East for a democracy. They are never going to be the Mini-Me that Bush and his cronies fantasized, but if they could be fairly stable and a reasonably strong ally, then the terrible sacrifices made by our soldiers and Marines will not have been in vain.
As Obama has repeatedly pointed out, his best military advisors have said that 16 months is a good timeframe for accomplishing most of those goals, and by the end of that 16 months, we will have been at war in Iraq for SEVEN YEARS. If they can't get it together by then, he basically said, then they're never going to get it together.
When the U.S. pulls out, as Thomas Ricks, my favorite Washington Post war correspondent and author of the seminal FIASCO, said, There will be consequences.
Whether we stay or leave, he said, it will be messy, and Americans have to be ready to deal with the consequences.
What Bush and his Brainless Trust never seemed to realize is that the entire Middle East is a tribal culture, ruled by warlords for centuries. Tyrants like Saddam Hussein can maintain control of them only by ruthless barbarism, and when you remove those tyrants, they will do what tribes do--go to war amongst themselves for power and control.
It's possible that there is enough of a fragile structure in Iraq now that the worst of this bloodshed will not occur when the U.S. finally leaves. We shall see. But we can't afford--not in treasure or manpower--to remain for the next 50 years, as Bush so famously suggested (backed by McCain)--to be their nannies.
As we saw in the former Yugoslavia, you can maintain brutal control over a country, as the Soviet Union did, for 50 years, but when you pull out, they're gonna do what they're gonna do. So we'd best get out now, and turn our attention where it's really needed, which is Pakistan and the Taliban and Afghanistan, where the REAL risk to our national security lies.
For me, a Marine mom who sent a son and nephews into the Iraq meat-grinder six times, today will be a far better day even than yesterday.
And yesterday was pretty damn good.
