Christian Brose evaluates Barack Obama's Iraq speech and points to a missed opportunity that struck me as I watched it. Obama only got to give the address he did because he was wrong about the surge. And George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain and others were right.
At the risk of heading into la-la land, I think Obama should have tipped his hat ever so slightly today to President Bush, Sen. McCain, and other Republicans who had supported the surge strategy, naming them and thanking them. Of course, there's no telling how Iraq would look today had the surge never happened, but it's likely that conditions would be pretty grim and that this withdrawal plan would have the smell of defeat to it, rather than the opposite, as it does.
Obama could have caveated this to death -- "I opposed Bush's decision to begin this war, I opposed how he sold it to America, I opposed the way he prosecuted it," etc. But he could have recognized that Bush's decision to change strategies in 2007 is in large part why the security situation in Iraq has turned around more than anyone could have hoped, why we can now begin drawing down our forces with a good measure of confidence, and why our troops now feel more and more that their sacrifice is worth it.
Not only would this have been magnanimous, it would have been smart politics. It would have acknowledged the bipartisanship that underlies the decision to begin bringing our troops home by drawing an important line of continuity through our Iraq efforts of the past two years. It would have disarmed Obama's more hawkish critics on Iraq by conceding their point on the surge and turning it into an argument for the drawdown, which it is. And it would have shown Republicans that Obama is committed not just to a bipartisanship of style but of substance -- not just being willing to recognize when the other side has valid points, but actually incorporating them into one's own thinking.
The whole post is smart.
I had some problems with the speech (see Tom Donnelly's comments below) and I am concerned that Obama's timeline locks him in to this drawdown even if conditions on the ground make it look increasingly unwise. But overall, it was a good speech. There are many on the loud-mouthed left who are too dim to understand it, but this was Bush's gift to his successor.
