Leaving Iraq - Obama's Missed Opportunity

I will admit that I did not watch Barack Obama's speech earlier this week on the alleged departure of combat troops from Iraq - although I did read the speech transcript. As readers cannot help but know, I am none too happy with Mr. Obama and his statement that Americans "turn the page" on the disaster in Iraq leaves the nation vulnerable to future fiascoes when played by liars and demagogues. George W. Bush is many things, but honorable and sincere are not two of them. By failing to throw the Iraq debacle squarely at the feet of the GOP and Chimperator Bush, Obama missed a golden opportunity to remind American's that much of the current deficit derives from 7 years of needless war in Iraq. He also missed the opportunity to tie the current economic hard times on the delusional Bush and the anti-regulation Republicans who set the stage for the financial market melt down. Only by clearly focusing on past mistakes and laying blame where it belongs can voters hopefully learn that voting based on slogans and/or cynically manipulated social issues does not replace electing candidates to office who are not focused solely on short term elector advantage. Frank Rich has a column in the New York Times that looks at Obama's failure and Jim Wallis has a piece in the Huffington Post that revisits the true cost of the Chimperator and Emperor Palpatine Cheney's fool's errand in Iraq. Here are highlights, first from Wallis' piece:
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The emotion that grips me this morning, after watching President Obama's speech last night and listening to the commentary about the "end of our combat mission in Iraq," is a deep sadness. Even in the Oval Office speech last night, the mission of the war in Iraq still wasn't made clear -- and it never was.
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This was a war started on a false pretext -- that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them or hand them off to terrorists.
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That Saddam Hussein was a terrible and brutal dictator was well known, but bombing his cities and people wasn't the only way to deal with him, as many church leaders pointed out at the time. And, of course, the U.S. hadn't made war on the countries of every other dictator who was as bad, or worse, than Saddam. But those dictators weren't sitting on deserts full of oil -- always the unspoken reality of our foreign policy and wars in the Middle Eastern region.
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But what makes me so sad this morning is the enormous human cost of the war in Iraq; and how a massive number of people and families -- in America and Iraq -- have had their lives ended or changed forever because of this war and will have a hard time turning the page.
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The human cost of the Iraq War is literally breathtaking. I went to a website last night that has documented the number and published the pictures of those who died, 4,400 so far. I couldn't stop looking at their pictures -- so young -- so many husbands and wives, fathers, mothers, and those still almost children themselves. . . . . Even conservative estimates of Iraqi civilian causalities are now over 100,000 with some estimates peaking over 1.3 million.
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The unbelievable financial cost of the Iraq war also has clear human consequences. What could that $1 trillion -- $745 billion in Iraq and $330 billion so far in Afghanistan -- have done instead of war? How might the eventual $3 trillion in estimated costs that include long-term consequences and veteran's needs have been better used?
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So was the war in Iraq worth the enormous human cost? My answer is no, the results are definitely not worth the cost.
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Obama sadly would have Americans turn the page on this enormous waste of human life and U.S. dollars. By doing so, he has given a huge gift to those in the GOP who brought us the debacle in the first place - and who want to resume control of Congress. I simply do not understand it. Frank Rich has this to say:
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What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose “end” he was marking.
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This mood has not lifted and may be thickening as we trudge toward Year 10 in Afghanistan. But Obama only paid it lip service. It’s a mystery why a candidate so attuned to the nation’s pulse, most especially on the matter of war, has grown tone deaf in office.
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In recent polls, 60 percent of those surveyed thought the war in Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent thought it wasn’t worth American lives, and only a quarter believed it made us safer from terrorism. This sour judgment is entirely reality-based. The war failed in all its stated missions except the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
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We handed Al Qaeda a propaganda coup by sacrificing America’s signature values on the waterboard. We disseminated untold billions of taxpayers’ dollars from Baghdad’s Green Zone, much of it cycled corruptly through well-connected American companies on no-bid contracts, yet Iraq still doesn’t have reliable electricity or trustworthy security.
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Of all the commentators on the debacle, few speak with more eloquence or credibility than Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University who as a West Point-trained officer served in Vietnam and the first gulf war and whose son, also an Army officer, was killed in Iraq in 2007. Writing in The New Republic after Obama’s speech, he decimated many of the war’s lingering myths, starting with the fallacy, reignited by the hawks taking a preposterous victory lap last week, that “the surge” did anything other than stanch the bleeding from the catastrophic American blundering that preceded it.
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As the Pentagon rebrands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New Dawn — a “name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid,” Bacevich aptly writes — the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The price will be to keep repeating it.
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The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-pay-later war.
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The other American casualties of Iraq include the credibility of both political parties, neither of which strenuously questioned the rush to war and both of which are still haunted by that failure, and of the news media, which barely challenged the White House’s propaganda about Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds.
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[T]here was no escaping the tragic fact that instead of bringing American-style democracy and freedom to Iraq, the costly war we fought there has, if anything, brought the bitter taste of Iraq’s dysfunction to America.
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The sad truth is that thousands died for no legitimate reason and trillions of dollars were wasted for no reason. That's right, no reason, other than the Chimperator's hubris and Cheney's greed and megalomania.