Barack on Iraq

The news from Iraq last week was not encouraging to the McCain plan for endless war there: at least 3 officials of the Iraqi government, on three separate occasions, expressed their desire that the U.S. withdraw its occupying forces, and set up a timetable to do so. Further, the Iraqi government forced the Bushites to back off their demands for an agreement that would allow permanent U.S. occupied bases, as well as provide enormous oil concessions.

Today Barack Obama used those events to reiterate his own plan for Iraq which was so bizarrely distorted in a media frenzy replicating a false McCain campaign charge. Obama notes:

"The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep. Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown."

Obama reinterates his positions on an immediate policy of withdrawal : " As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months...In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected."

Obama concludes: "In this campaign, there are honest differences over Iraq, and we should discuss them with the thoroughness they deserve. Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea, and would redeploy our troops out of Iraq and focus on the broader security challenges that we face. But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender. It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war."

Obama will soon go to Iraq on a fact-finding mission with a Democratic and a Republican Senator, both veterans. There is right now a fascinating report from Iraq at the New York Review of Books by Michael Massing, who describes being embedded recently, the observations of troops there, and an overall context. His basic conclusion is not very far from Obama's: in certain ways, the situation has improved--but it hasn't made any real difference for the U.S. He quotes a military intelligence officer: "If we weren't here, there are a lot of people who'd be dead the next day. But we're spinning our wheels. Al-Qaeda is defeated, but now we face Iraq's internal problems. They have to be handled politically and socially... we're ultimately occupiers. And I don't think you can democratize a country by being occupiers. Though we've made a lot of progress, the core issues remain. And if we can't find a political solution to them, we'll never get out of here."

While many in the military held similar views, Massing found that the truly clueless were the Bushite diplomats isolated in the Green Zone. He had lunch with one such official: "How often, I wondered, did he get out of the Green Zone to meet with Baghdad residents whose supply of electricity is down to two hours a day, or visit the pharmacies where basic medications like Tylenol are unavailable, or see the wretched tents and shacks where many of the two-million-plus internally displaced Iraqis have been forced to live?"

The article is rich in detail, but I also found one somewhat stunning item in the final footnote, an indication of where McCain's we'll be there for a hundred years idea came from. It came from Bush.

Massing quotes an interview NBC reporter Richard Engel did with Bush, in which Bush told him the war in Iraq "is going to take forty years."

So that's the choice? Not only four more years with McBush--but forty more years in Iraq?