Washington Post: Obama Is Lucky He Was Wrong About Iraq
When Obama takes office he won’t have the “mess: to clean up in Iraq as he and so many of his fellow liberals said he would. By that time Iraq will be under the control of a sovereign government, and our troops will be scheduled to come home.
All despite defeatists like Obama and most of the rest of his political party. The Washington Post admits as much in a grudging editorial:
The Bush administration worked patiently and tirelessly to negotiate the new agreement, which will have the effect of removing Iraq from United Nations supervision on Jan. 1. Having all but destroyed his presidency through mismanagement of the war, Mr. Bush can now fairly argue as he leaves office that his successor will inherit an Iraqi mission that has been stabilized both militarily and politically. That’s not the same thing as the “victory” Mr. Bush has often spoken of; Iraq could still unravel if its leaders or the Obama administration act unwisely. There is now, however, a workable road map for winding down the U.S. troop presence in the country and for consolidating the new political system. Mr. Obama will receive this framework from the president and the Iraqi government he has spent the last two years campaigning against. Though we don’t expect him to say so, Mr. Obama is fortunate that he was wrong, both about the surge and about the capacity of Iraq’s leaders.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame President Bush for mismanaging the war. Certainly he made mistakes, but what war-time President hasn’t? America lost its first engagements with the enemy in World War II. There was little progress in the Civil War for years until Lincoln found the right general to take the fight to the Confederates.
The invasion of Iraq was completed quickly, and executed almost flawlessly. That the occupation of Iraq, and the war against the insurgency that went with it, raged on for several years until we found the right strategy for it is hardly something that can be wrote off as “mismanagement.” Bush made mistakes, yes, but better to have made those mistakes than to have done what the media/left (same thing) did and written the war off. Bush got it right in the end, and never abandoned what he started in Iraq (which is what the left/media wanted him to do), and ultimately that trumps any “mismanagement” he may be guilty of.
As for destroying his Presidency, it is the short-sighted folks on the left who did that by choosing partisanship over sound foreign policy. Rather than working with President Bush to figure out how the war could be won, partisans like Harry Reid (who delcared the war lost), John Kerry (who made Iraq an issue during his campaign in 2004) and Barack Obama (who singled himself out from his fellow Democrats in the primaries by standing on his anti-Iraq position) used Iraq as a whooping stick to beat up on their political enemies. And it worked. Their defeatism, amplified by willing accomplices in the media, ground down America’s will on the Iraq war.
Thankfully, Bush stuck to his guns and won the war (even if the editorial board at the Washington Post won’t admit it).
