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Why can't Obama admit the obvious? The surge worked
Obama was right about war, wrong about surge; McCain vice versa.
In January 2007, America's adventure in Iraq seemed like a chaotic
failure.
The country was riven with sectarian violence, and al-Qaeda in Iraq had
gained a foothold in western Anbar province. Attacks on U.S. troops were
running well over 1,000 a week, and Iraqi civilians were dying at a rate
of
more than 3,000 a month.
In that context, President Bush's announcement that month that he planned
to
"surge" more than 20,000 extra U.S. troops into Iraq felt to many critics,
including Sen. Barack Obama, like doubling down on failure. A year and a
half later, though, violence is down dramatically and there's a cautious
hope that both the U.S. and Iraq could achieve an outcome once seemed out
of
reach.
The surge didn't do all of that; a cease-fire by ****ite militias and the
switch by Sunni insurgents from attacking Americans to fighting al-Qaeda
helped enormously. But the extra U.S. troops, brilliantly deployed by Gen.
David Petraeus, have made a huge difference in calming the chaos. In doing
so, it also contributed to the other developments.
Why then can't Obama bring himself to acknowledge the surge worked better
than he and other skeptics, including this page, thought it would? What
does
that stubbornness say about the kind of president he'd be?
In recent comments, the Democratic presidential candidate has grudgingly
conceded that the troops helped lessen the violence, but he has insisted
that the surge was a dubious policy because it allowed the situation in
Afghanistan to deteriorate and failed to produce political breakthroughs
in
Iraq. Even knowing the outcome, he told CBS News Tuesday, he still
wouldn't
have sup****ted the idea.
That's hard to fathom. Even if you believe that the invasion of Iraq was a
grievous error - and it was - the U.S. should still make every effort to
leave behind a stable situation. Obama seems stuck in the first part of
that
thought process, repeatedly proclaiming that he was right to oppose the
war
and disparaging worthwhile efforts to fix the mess it created. Hence, his
dismissal of the surge as "a tactical victory imposed upon a huge
strategic
blunder."
The great irony, of course, is that the success of the surge has made
Obama's plan to withdraw combat troops in 16 months far more plausible
than
when he proposed it. Another irony is that while Obama downplays the
effectiveness of the surge in Iraq, he is urging a similar tactic now in
Afghanistan.
As for the surge not producing sufficient political reconciliation in
Iraq,
it's true that efforts to integrate Sunnis into a ****ite-dominated
political
culture are only inching forward. But reconciliation takes many forms, and
****ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's military attacks against rogue
****ite militias in Basra and Baghdad's Sadr City were a hugely im****tant
signal to Sunnis.
Perhaps it's too much to ask that Obama risk being taunted by headlines
such
as "Obama says Bush was right." But for the nation to move forward on its
single most vexing debate, it would help if the next president could admit
the obvious - whether that's Republican John McCain conceding that it was
a
terrible blunder to invade Iraq in the first place, or Obama acknowledging
that the surge has worked better than he expected.
Americans don't expect their president to be right all the time. They do
expect him to change course when he's proved wrong.
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