The Iraqis kicked us out. After investing hundreds of billions of dollars and sacrificing over 4,000 American servicemen and women (and tens of thousands of more Iraqi soldiers and civilians), the Obama administration finally gave up. President Obama had opposed the war, and his team couldn’t be bothered to flex the diplomatic muscle necessary to ensure all our efforts there hadn’t gone to waste.
You get the sense that the administration won’t even care too much if Iraq unravels — they’ll still be able to pat themselves on the back for the positions they took in 2003. We may be witnessing a kind of I-told-you-so diplomacy, concerned more with past-score settling and domestic politics than with what’s best for the United States and the Middle East. When it came time to work out a deal to allow a stabilizing force of American troops to stay, Obama reportedly wouldn’t even pick up the phone. According to phone logs released by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Obama called Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki twice this year — once on February 13, and once just over a week ago to tell al-Maliki that U.S. troops would be gone by the end of the year.
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To me, it’s almost a crime for the commander-in-chief to ignore diplomacy when we have troops posted in harm’s way. It was clear as soon as it took office that the Obama administration had abandoned Iraq. On my last trip there, about a year ago, I met with State Department officials who worried that as the war stopped getting attention in Washington, it would mean the State Department mission would not get the funds it needed. Sure enough, that’s what’s happened. State’s grander ambitions for a more robust presence — which would have included training Iraqi security forces — had to be scaled back as well. As the Washington Postreports, we’ll be going from a $50 billion–a–year budget in 2011 for the military to a $6 billion–a–year budget for the embassy in 2012. Yet they are going to be expected to do many of the same activities.
I’m concerned — no, convinced — that we’re setting the State Department up for failure. Its presence in Iraq will be just big enough to be a big target, yet not big enough to have much influence or ability to respond to the fast-changing environment. Much of the country will be essentially off limits, which is likely to add to the already isolated living conditions for personnel posted in Baghdad. Without the funds, what exactly are we expecting our diplomats to do? Without the support of the U.S. military, even the most basic of capacity-building activities are likely to end in failure. And, with the White House so clearly signaling that Iraq isn’t a priority, our diplomats are going to have a hard time convincing Maliki that they have a friend in Washington. Though Baghdad’s ties with Tehran are often over-hyped, there’s no longer any reason for Maliki to even pretend that we are going to make a better ally than Iran.
On a personal level, I feel for the Iraqis who had worked for us. We promised them we were in it for the long haul, and it’s heartbreaking to see us violate those promises. During the worst of the fighting, one of my Iraqi friends would joke that once things got better, I’d finally be able to come over to his family’s house in Sadr City for dinner. When I was in Iraq last year, this visit was still out of the question. Now, with our presence there diminished, our standing ruined, our promises broken — with an empowered Iran and an abandoned Iraq — it will certainly be a long time, if it happens in my lifetime, before any American can spend a casual evening in Sadr City.
— Elise Jordan is a New York–based writer and commentator. She served as a director for communications in the National Security Council in 2008–09 and was a speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
After Bush wasted 4,000 lives and blew trillion dollars, Ms Jordan is mad because we do not waste even more. For what ? She does not bother to say.
The Bush administration also put every dime of this unnecessary war on the National Credit card, thus ensuring that however much we may wish to forget the long awful 8 years of utter incompetence and profligate spending, we cannot.
Yes, it's much more competent to just shoot drone missiles to kill thousands of men, women and children all over the world, eh?
(2000 and climbing)
And true competence is helping the muslim brotherhood to take over all of the middle east?
Yep, smooth move Ex-lax, world peace is right around the corner now.
Or is it world pieces?
Spoken like someone who has not paid the ultimate sacrifice for their country. The people who we need to feel sorry for are our military families who lost loved ones doing what a strong commander and chief asked of them for their country. And now have to deal with the legacy of a weak commander and chief,
They don;t get to pick the missions, but we pray we elect leaders who has the country's best interests at heart!! This commander and Chief does not care about the military, their families or the commitments of this country. He cares only about his own political ambitions - I am glad my sons have net been old enough to serve under this president!! We owe it to our militrary and our country to elect a new president who loves and respects this country and those who serve it. Not a self serving narcissistic dictator who prefers to rule as opposed to lead!!!
Hopefully a new President can reverse what this one has done on way too many levels.
Speaking of sacrifices.. as the man said, "What do you tell the family of the last man to die for a lost cause?"
I suppose we ought to ask GWB, Cheney and Rumsfeld. About 15 deferments and a sketchy national guard stint between them all...they should be really up on the whole "shared sacrifice" and the country's best interest stuff right?
Clearly you are forgetting where you are. This is the new NRO. No longer a place for honest debate. Just another screamer in the echo chamber. The place where facts, nuance, logic or critical reasoning skills are verbotten. See Malkin, Michelle.
Please just blame it all on Obama...or if not Obama, Pelosi...or Frank....or whomever. Just never EVER criticize a republican, republican policies, or GWB. EVER.
It looks to me as if we're poised to do the same thing to Iraq that we did to South Vietnam. After winning the war the Democrats come into power and abandon the country and cut off all funding, stabbing those who helped us in the back. It's very similar to the politics of the faculty lounge. I guess the Democrats can't help themselves, they need the money to buy votes. It's odd, isn't it? The Democrats destroy our allies so they use the money to buy votes, the Republicans buy votes by pressing for greater freedom. I wish this was true of all Republicans.
I forget, when did that war end ... was it 1945 ? True, we did find the bases useful until 1989. But we had the Soviets to worry about ... no need to worry about the Islamist or Iran.
"We may be witnessing a kind of I-told-you-so diplomacy, concerned more with past-score settling and domestic politics than with what’s best for the United States and the Middle East."
Bingo.
This Administration has placed politics at the head of every decision in Iraq. Michele Obama's "support" for military families is condescending bordering on obtuse. Barack Obama has "Vietnamized" the Iraq War from the beginning and yes, I feel our troops have died in vain. At least our returning veterans aren't being pelted with tomatoes. Sickening.
We will live with this disaster of political ambition for decades. Carter was merely incompetent.
If our government was unable or unwilling to secure a binding non-surrender agreement for our troops (in order to protect them from unlawful prosecution), then we have no choice but to bring them home. This was perhaps the biggest failure of diplomacy, but the author doesn't even mention it. There is a story, just not here I'm afraid.
While I am pleasantly surprised that "transformational diplomacy" wasn't included along with the rest of the drivel, there is nothing useful or relevant here. Is the author really Peggy Noonan disguised as one of Condi's former communications hacks? If I talk to some of the striped pants crowd and write up a confused, emotional sob story about how they feel about budgets, may I get published too? I promise to have no point whatsoever, and back it up with pure emotional mush. Buckets of it.
While I appreciate that there are outlets (NRO and others) and reporters such as this who will continue to point out the lunacy (for lack of a better word) of O, I can't honestly be expected to believe that anyone is surprised that the revealed interests of the current administration are not always on a par those who fight, bleed and die for this country (just to use one glaring example). Even with the lack of media vetting prior to the last Presidential election, everyone still knew what this guy was all about.
Never trust Americans. They will say all sorts of lofty words then abandon you. Everybody in the world including Americans knows that by now.
Note how Russia and China still protect their old allies often without any economic or "rational" political reason.
This is how you make friends.
When next time you wonder why people hate Americans consider how you would feel toward a backstabbing rich "friend".
Russia supports her allies? Like Afghanistan? Cuba? Egypt? Syria? And China supports her allies like North Korea? While I agree that closing up shop may well be problematic, your hyperbolic diatribe about hating America is a bit off the mark where you try to point to those bastions of loyalty-over-self-interest, Russia and China.
We won the Vietnam War militarily, and we won the Iraq War, both through the incredible skill and determination of our armed services. In both cases we will have thrown away our victories. Yes, the Democrats will have been most directly responsible for both self-inflicted defeats, but the outside world will only remember it as "the Americans" who abandoned everything that had been fought for. And yes, the Democrats and a large swath of the media will engage in revisionist history for decades afterwards. In the end, though, history is history and the effects of these post-war blunders will be real enough. Think for one minute what the world would have been like if we had done the same thing with Japan and West Germany after World War II (which we did to a limited extent by carving up Europe and turning over the eastern countries to the tender mercies of Joe Stalin and the Soviets).
Even though the Iraqi government decided to unilaterally prosecute US troops for alleged crimes in what would be undoubtedly be a retaliatory kangaroo court, we should stay there?
Should we ignore the wishes of the
sovereign Iraqi government that we are supposedly trying to build-up? They didn't give us a ticker tape parade in Baghdad and they won't thank us in another decade or another half a century.
Didn't Barrack "Hussein" "Nobama" campaign to exit Iraq and that's one of the contributing factors to his victory? So the will of the US public is irrelevant when occupying foreign lands?
Too bad NRO lost some cannon fodder on how Nobama "failed" to follow his campaign promise of exiting Iraq yet this transformed to the Plan B
defeatism argument a la Vietnam.
I believe the founder of National Review said something about the permanence of human behavior, history, and culture and the futile
attempts to change them.
There is nothing dishonorable about leaving a country that does not want us there and is willing to arrest and execute our troops as official
policy. And should we just bankrupt ourselves until Iraq is...better? Is Vietnam that bad these days? Are we better off for making Korea,
Germany, Japan richer and slowly destroying our automobile and tech industry in the process? The cold war was a different world and a different war. You cannot compare their occupation with the present circumstances. And we cannot AFFORD to occupy and provide the defense
of half the earth last time I checked our balance sheet.
Is the endstate for Iraq to be like Qatar at the endless expense of US blood and treasure? Or better yet "liberated" Libya with Sharia Law?
