The Washington Post On Obama & Iraq

The Washington Post On Obama & Iraq
Liberal paper that they are, the Washington Post editorial board at least recognizes that Iraq isn't a partisan game, but a deadly serious matter. This July 16, 2008 editorial is quite clear that Obama is in way over his head, and driven by ideology, not facts:

Early last year, when the war was at its peak, the Democratic candidate proposed a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces in slightly more than a year. Yesterday, with bloodshed at its lowest level since the war began, Mr. Obama endorsed the same plan. After hinting earlier this month that he might "refine" his Iraq strategy after visiting the country and listening to commanders, Mr. Obama appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq.
Mr. Obama's charge against the Republicans was not entirely fair, since Mr. Bush has overseen the withdrawal of five American brigades from Iraq this year, and Mr. McCain has suggested that he would bring most of the rest of the troops home by early 2013. Mr. Obama's timeline would end in the summer of 2010, a year or two before the earliest dates proposed recently by members of the Iraqi government. The real difference between the various plans is not the dates but the conditions: Both the Iraqis and Mr. McCain say the withdrawal would be linked to the ability of Iraqi forces to take over from U.S. troops, as they have begun to do. Mr. Obama's strategy allows no such linkage -- his logic is that a timetable unilaterally dictated from Washington is necessary to force Iraqis to take responsibility for the country.
At the time he first proposed his timetable, Mr. Obama argued -- wrongly, as it turned out -- that U.S. troops could not stop a sectarian civil war. He conceded that a withdrawal might be accompanied by a "spike" in violence. Now, he describes as "an achievable goal" that "we leave Iraq to a government that is taking responsibility for its future -- a government that prevents sectarian conflict and ensures that the al-Qaeda threat which has been beaten back by our troops does not reemerge." How will that "true success" be achieved? By the same pullout that Mr. Obama proposed when chaos in Iraq appeared to him inevitable.

In retrospect, the Iraq war may have been a mistake, and certainly Bush made some very serious mistakes in how the occupation was handled. But with the amount of money, lives, and suffering we have suffered for this war, to prematurely withdraw now and risk putting al-Qaeda and the crowd that tortures people to death with power tools in charge would achieve maximum costs with maximum bad results. I'm no fan of McCain, but at least he seems to understand that foreign policy is not a game that you play to make the radical left wing of the Democratic Party feel good about themselves.