OBAMA AND THE CRAZY GLUE DEMOCRATS

Peter Huessy

What is Senator Obama’s position on the status of US forces in Iraq? Apparently, it depends upon the day of the week, which of his 300 advisers is talking and which way the political winds are blowing. He has been for an immediate withdrawal, a withdrawal over 16 months, a phased withdrawal that doesn’t jeopardize the security of US troops, and a withdrawal after consulting with our military commanders. In many instances, his position on one day has changed the next. Statements on his website on Wednesday are gone or changed on Thursday.

Now, Obama says he is now on the same page as US commanders in Iraq, something he adamantly refused to consider for months. He now says that everyone agrees on withdrawal from Iraq, except there is this disagreement over whether that should depend upon conditions on the ground. Well, yes, there is that thing about whether you withdraw just to withdraw or you withdraw or drawdown American troops because the security situation allows you to do so. So he is not on the same page as General Patraeus, though he is desperate to pretend that he is. The LA Times editorial this morning was equally confused declaring it didn’t matter whether Senator Obama was right or wrong about the surge—the US is getting out of Iraq and that is all that matters.

So what has Barack learned from this foray overseas--nothing. His position on Iraq simply excludes the one that matters: US forces should stay in Iraq until we have won the war against the terrorists, the remnants of the Bathist regime and Iranian supported militias. He cannot bring himself to call for victory in Iraq. And he still refuses to say he should have supported the surge and its attendant change in strategy or that he was wrong in saying the surge wouldn’t work. In short, the trip to Afghanistan and Iraq has demonstrated his complete inability to understand why it is Americans don’t support his stance on the war against the terror masters. He repeatedly has acted as if he doesn’t care whether we loose in Iraq. Having declared the war unnecessary, it is thus immaterial how the war ends. If getting in was wrong, then getting out in the wrong way obviously doesn’t matter. One of his advisers, Larry Korb, said that we had to lose the war in Iraq so we could win the war against terror, just as losing in Vietnam allowed us to win the Cold War.

Is this then a tipping point of this election? The issue is now even dividing his supporters. For example, Lanny Davis, an ardent Clinton supporter, wrote this past weekend that Democrats have a moral obligation to ensure that we do not leave Iraq prematurely and throw away the extraordinary progress that has been made. In short, even he understands the perils of stealing defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq, to say nothing of compounding such a travesty by stealing the valor of our American soldiers—as was done in Vietnam-- by throwing away their extraordinary successes.

But Obama doesn’t appear to understand the broader context of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is fixated on the attacks of 9/11 and his erroneous idea that the only or primary terror threat facing the United States is from Al Qaeda in its Pakistani sanctuary. Immediately after 9/11, he wrote that the attacks were carried out by Moslems unhappy with life, a helplessness caused by despair, and a lack of education. This is akin to the very views of his pals Reverend Wright and David Ayers, and reflects the views of the New York Times and much of the drive-by media: US foreign policy causes resentment and helplessness among the “Arab street” and they thus turn to violence.

Ignore for the moment that the leader of the 9/11 hijackers was Mohammed Atta, a college graduate, or that the 9/11 planner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has degrees from schools of higher learning, or that Arafat’s father was an Egyptian doctor or that Osama Bin Laden himself is a millionaire. And forget that most terrorist attacks against the US and its allies in the past half century have been directed by states such as the former USSR, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria that have used terror groups for their own purposes.

In short, what Obama clings to is a view that terrorism is fundamentally caused by US policy and our supposed failures in bringing about a Palestinian state. This in turn is reinforced by an almost universal belief in the “peace process”, that has ensnared successive US and Israeli governments in seeking legal agreements with the very terrorists themselves and their state sponsors which want nothing else but to destroy the very state—Israel—with which they supposedly are seeking an agreement to live in peace. This is what we get when we adopt the viewpoint “Blame America First”. But Obama is stuck there, and that is why he has friends such as the Reverend Wright.

As such, Obama remains imprisoned in a false bubble of wishful thinking and misunderstanding the world. The wishful thinking is that left lone Saddam Hussein was not a threat to the US or its allies. And a false belief that Saddam was somehow uninvolved in terrorism and attacks against the United States. If he would simply read reports of his own Senate committees he would see that Saddam had helped Al Qaeda with chemical poisons, which was one of the principle rationales for the Clinton-era military strikes against the Saddam government. In addition, in late 2002, according to Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, Iraq was training international terrorists at a secret base near Baghdad for the first time since the Persian Gulf war. And when asked whether the intelligence evidence of Saddam’s Iraq as a threat to the US in 2003 was consistent with evidence put forward during the latter years of the Clinton administration, Senator Clinton herself said “yes”.

But Barack and most Democrats refuse to process the facts of terrorism. Senator Biden, thought of perhaps as a candidate for Vice President on the Democratic Party ticket, says that there are no bad guys in Iraq. Who does he think our courageous soldiers and their coalition and Iraqi partners have been killing with such great success? Perhaps he believes as the House Speaker does that it is all due to the “goodwill of the Iranians”—which of course raises the secondary issue that if violence in Iraq is really dependent upon Iranian goodwill then it is indeed the fact that terrorism is primarily state sponsored and not due to the helplessness or despair of the “Arab street”. But these false mantras remain stuck on the brains of Democrats with MoveOn.org crazy glue—no facts on earth can apparently separate the two.

This then is why for the past four years, Senator Obama has not been able to bring himself to recognize the necessity of “winning” in Iraq and thus no strategy that he has adopted ever even hinted he would support any strategy that would defeat the Bathists, Iranians and terrorists in Iraq. Withdrawal from Iraq was thus simply an end all by itself—the liberation of Iraq was wrong, there was no threat from Saddam, so why win? But now that we are winning, Obama and his blame America first crowd don’t know what to do.



Having portrayed American soldiers as the cause of the violence in Iraq---remember Senator Kerry’s view of our servicemen “terrorizing Iraqi women and children in the dead of night”---Obama has painted himself in a corner. Getting out of our garrisons and imbedding ourselves within Iraqi communities was precisely the opposite strategy pushed by the foreign policy elites upon which he so relies. But this strategy adopted by President Bush, led by the heroic General Patraeus and implemented by thousands of courageous American soldiers and their Iraqi and coalition partners, has transformed Iraq in warp speed. It is this strategy which will allow us to largely withdraw but only as conditions on the ground allow.

Michael Yon, a former Green Beret and author of the new book “Moment of Truth in Iraq”, writes that “The Iraqi war is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people have won.” By that he explains “the Iraqi government’s legitimacy is no longer threatened by the insurgents, the government is able to protect its own people and the people are participating in the government…In Iraq, all three conditions apply”. He further says “Al Qaeda has been pushed out of its urban enclaves and is being chased into the hills…the Shiite militias are largely seen as criminal groups.” This is what Senator Obama appears not to understand nor accept. Nothing else really matters except this obvious fact: he remains stubbornly wedded to a fictionalized view of the world despite the contrary evidence staring him right in the face. And what is the point of having 300 national security advisers when despite their supposed collective wisdom, they cannot come up with a coherent strategy or position on Iraq or the war with the terror masters? Not exactly the “wisdom” or “judgment” needed by the occupant of the oval office located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the United States of America.

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Peter R. Huessy is currently the president of GeoStrategic Analysis, a defense and national security consulting business. In addition to writing for OpinionEditorials.com, he is also a guest lecturer, appearing at such fine institutions as the School of Advanced International Affairs, Johns Hopkins University, The Institute of World Politics, and The National War College. Mr. Huessy has spent his career working in government organizations and committees, such as the United Nations, The Environmental Fund, Department of the Interior, and the National Defense University Foundation.

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