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President Obama was pretty subdued when talking about Iraq last night at his press conference. "We just saw an election in Iraq that went relatively peacefully and you get a sense that the political system is now functioning in a meaningful way," Obama said about last weekend’s provincial elections. "Relatively" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Anbar Province, the former hotbed of the Sunni insurgency, is locked in a contentious inter-Sunni struggle over who in fact won the election, complete with competing accusations of vote fraud and intimidation. This New York Times piece gives a sense of the combustibility of the situation:
Mr. Taha, the winning candidate from Anbar, who was one of the front-runners on Mr. Mutlaq’s slate there, has served as a sports and youth adviser for the region’s governor and was, he claimed, a protégé of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday during the 1990s. (That the governor is affiliated to the Iraqi Islamic Party shows how convoluted politics have become in Anbar and elsewhere.)
He said his supporters had been threatened and beaten by police officers loyal to the Islamic Party — before the election and after. “People will be eliminated,” Mr. Taha, 37, warned.
And yet Taha is, by his own admission, hiding in a Green Zone hotel, "afraid" to go back to Anbar.
Now for a premature meta-point. For years, George W. Bush misrepresented the depth and the nature of violence in Iraq so as not to jeopardize his political standing and his desired course for the occupation. People didn’t like being lied to. Bush’s legacy and his party paid the cost.
This is a lesson Obama should really take to heart. Obama doesn’t want to be in the position of misrepresenting reality in Iraq so as to jeopardize a very desired troop reduction and then withdrawal. The same goes for progressives more broadly. Withdrawal is guaranteed by the Status of Forces Agreement. It doesn’t need a rosy portrait of the situation in Iraq. A million things can go wrong in Iraq. Nothing will go even close to right without a clear-eyed assessment of what the situation actually is. Frankly, if Bush gave the statement that Obama did last night, I suspect progressives would reject it as a sign of detachment from reality.
Crossposted to The Streak.
11 Comments
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Thank you Spencer.
I’m certain Obama is getting his daily briefs on Iraq and Afghanistan but trying to get the stimulus bill passed has him pretty preoccupied at the moment. You’re right though, better to be completely candid on the subject than sacrifice credibility.
Excellent, Spencer: tell the people the truth, President Obama, just like you said you would. Don’t start out lying about another President’s war, like LBJ did.
Spencer calls it like it is. Obama is talking like Dubya would here.
Spencer, you’ve been following Iraq since the invasion and I seem to remember that you spent time talking about the last election there.
How would the elections compare?
Hugo Chavez said it like it is yesterday.
“Obama has same stench as Bush”
President Obama is defending Bush`s state secrets in the 9th Circuit Court
of Appeals at this writing. He is moving forward and not looking backwards
in calls to investigate the Bush Administration.ect, ect.
Chavez to my opinion has a pretty good idea Obama is being handled the same
way Bush was.
Good thread, Spence. Obama’s trying to get on top of our economic problems is the thing to do now, but down the road, his, and our, toughest fight is going to be dealing with getting us out of the twin clusterfucks and then dealing the “Who lost Iraq/Afghanistan?” bullshit from the petro-patriots.
Within 6 months, latest, he needs to Trumanize the two wannabe MacArthurs, Petraeus and Odierno, or they will be doing everything they can to sustain bush’s loon crusade long enough for it to become Obama’s loon crusade.
Also, Obama needs to tell Hillary to stay the hell away from Iraq. Any photo-op schmoozing and swapping of media spit from her with Petraeus and Odierno will be a huge benefit for them as they go about the task of trying to keep us locked in to Iraq. They need to be isolated in preparation for their being “reassigned”.
Don’t quite know yet.
We need to get out of Iraq. Bush and his generals had nearly 6 years to get it right and they never did. Now it’s time just to leave. We can try to be responsible about how we do it. We can try to minimize power vacuums. We can encourage a political settlement. But none of this should deter us from just getting the hell out.
We’re on the way out for sure. Obama couldn’t be much plainer on that.
Well yeah, it does. It is able to be revised if the Iraqis believe they need the troops there. Something that Iraqi officials were predicting more than 3 months ago when Sunni problems were far less overt.