Obama & Iraq

It's not that Obama remains innocently clueless about Iraq; it's that he willfully maintains the appearance of being clueless, and there's nothing innocent about that. He can't admit the obvious progress of the US effort there, because a large chunk of his base will not hear of anything that smacks of success by the hated Chimpy McBushitler, and would not forgive him if he voiced it. So, he continues trot out the soft-left line, that we should have been in Afghanistan all along, that any military intervention should have been limited to hunting down Osama bin Laden, that the whole Iraq effort has been a distraction and a mistake. He has delicately steered clear of the hard-left narrative, that the effort was based on lies about WMD and is nothing but an oil-fueled, genocidal crime against humanity for which Bush and his henchmen must eventually be tried in a court of law. But it's a balancing act, so Obama has not condemned that sort of sewage, either.

This whole problem would have been solved for Obama if only the Congressional Democrats had been successful in forcing a US defeat in Iraq; Pelosi-Reid tried their best, but ultimately failed at that task. This leaves Obama now forced to talk in terms of a defeatist scenario that bears a steadily diminishing relationship to reality. That requires some bizarre gymnastics, such as finally and reluctantly being compelled to admit that the Surge has had some success -- but then giving the credit to Sunni sheiks instead of the American military! Question is, who you gonna believe, Obama or your own lying eyes? Obama true believers seem to have no problem going with the former. The result is what we see, a pas de deux of dishonesty about Iraq that is nearly astonishing in its cynicism.

CHeck out Al Qaeda’s Defeat In Iraq by Michael Totten, who unlike Obama has spent a lot of time in Iraq observing the course of events there.

Byron