Iraq and the Obama Parallels

It seems that the path Obama is traversing is one that is well worn. A chronological summary below.

1. Heck of a job Obama

2010

On Larry King Live last night, Vice President Joe Biden said Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”

2. Mission Accomplished

2011

In a speech at Ft. Bragg, NC on December 14, 2011, President Barack Obama said the United States was “leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

3. Flawed Intelligence

2014

Saturday from the White House South Lawn, President Barack Obama blamed “intelligence estimates” for not anticipating the speed in which ISIS would capture large sections of Iraq.
The president,who has been under harsh media criticism for likening ISIS to an Al-Qaeda JV basketball team in January said, “There is no doubt that their advance their movement over the last several of months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think the the expectation of policy makers both in and outside of Iraq.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdoDFV5lKaA

Now the mission has gone from sending 300 special forces troops in June to bombing missions in August and Obama is stating that “this is going to be a long-term project.

Of course it wasn’t suppose to be this way as one of Obama’s favourite blogger Andrew Sullivan, better known for this assertion that Trig Palin, Sarah Palin’s son, was actually the child of her daughter, Bristol, noted in 2007.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy….

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring states, engaging America’s estranged allies, tamping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.

Welcome to the reality-based world.