In the midst of the Obama-McCain sparring over Iraq this past week, George Packer provides a useful reminder: “The Shiite-led government has been trying to get American forces out of the way for at least two years.” Maliki’s endorsement of the Obama timetable is not some bolt from the blue, and it has everything to do with Iraq’s internal politics, about which Americans on the right, left and center tend to know vanishingly little.
McCain and his proxies would like us to believe the war began when the surge began, and that nothing before the surge matters. But take a close look at McCain’s
attack on the Obama anti-surge stance and consider its full implications:
“If Sen. Obama had prevailed, American forces would have had to retreat under fire. The Iraqi army would have collapsed. Civilian casualties would have increased dramatically,” the Arizona Republican said. “Civil war, genocide and wider conflict would have been very, very likely. Above all, America would have been humiliated and weakened.”
If there’s a more succinct, slam-dunk argument that the Bush administration has weakened (McCain’s term) the national security posture of the United States, I’m not aware of it. Everything in McCain’s above statement is a direct result of the 2003 Iraq invasion he championed. It is the war, not the surge, that is the relevant predictor of sound judgment. It is McCain, not Obama, who allowed our troops to be placed in this situation, making the U.S. appear a bumbling giant in the eyes of the world. And yet McCain, as the networks and the polls keep telling us, is somehow the more “trusted” voice on foreign policy.
