The main point; - America's combat brigades will leave Iraq over the next 18 months. If you decide to ignore the rest of this blog, I promise you won’t be missing much. I was tempted to stop writing at this very juncture except that I have an odd fascination with semantic details, plus I care a little too much about fine prints. This morning, President Obama spoke to military troops and officers at Camp LeJeune , in North Carolina and he was very candid and succinct in his arguments. So candid, that his Democratic hard cores like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are almost fuming. I know the Pelosi ‘fuming’ part of the sentence discredits the whole case (because she fumes at every proposal), but apparently Obama’s timeline for an exit strategy is not what Democrats want.
Before I get sidetracked with any details, this is actually where my disgust for ‘party politics’ start. When a person is so confined to ideology and biased reasoning that no matter what the circumstances are, they are stuck to it. Isn’t that the same criticisms we piled on George W. Bush? Obama’s administration wants to "proceed cautiously”, but Pelosi’s crew want the withdrawal to start immediately, and having troops in Iraq till 2011 is too far into the future.
Yeah, yeah, I remember listening to the campaign speeches about pulling troops out within 16 months of taking office. The timeline involving roughly 100,000 troops will be two months longer, roughly speaking. Give the guy a break, this is Iraq we are talking about here; a country where a bomb is guaranteed to explode just as likely as Dunkin Doughnut’s can guarantee hazelnut coffee on a Monday morning. Hard timelines are marginally unrealistic in most cases, and it’s not surprising that the same people who hailed Obama as a ‘pragmatist’ are the same people wondering how he became a Republican.
I maintain that we cannot just flip a switch and fix the chaos in Iraq; else G.W. would have pulled that off a long time ago. The reality is that leaving about 50,000 troops to help train Iraqi forces and undertake counter-terrorism missions, is a sharp improvement from not having any clue of what we do next. Disregard my opinion if you may, but that is not too bad a proposition.
I listened carefully as the President made it unequivocally clear the date August 31, 2010. You can bet your rent on it that many Americans have already misconstrued what he meant by that. An exit strategy from Iraq is no easy task, (rust me on this one) it’s not your usual trip to Wal-Mart. After 8 years of hanging out in Iraq, redirecting the military traffic into Afghanistan will mean having a very clear outline in what the mission should and will be. Another 8 years in the desert will be a costly excursion, something the American taxpayer cannot afford. The fact that John McCain applauds Obama’s game plan shouldn’t alter the validity of the proposal. Not to give any credence to Harry Reid’s and Nancy Pelosi’s ‘beef’ with Obama’s timeline on troop levels; on one side of the aisle, violence is down significantly in Baghdad and most of Iraq, but that is not enough reason to pack up and exit.
So here we are in 2009, with a practical and tactical plan to leave Iraq in the hands of Iraqi’s, whose national surplus swells by the minute, and just as rapidly as America’s plunge. We all knew that at some point, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and his people will have their destiny in their hands, and to do with it as they so wish.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the time has come. Adios Amigos.
Another random thought.
