Willfull ignorance
For a number of us foreign policy hawks, the problem with the Iraq war wasn’t the war itself but George W. Bush’s totally inept handling of it, compounded by his refusal to adapt to situations on the ground and loyalty to Donald Rumsfeld. There was nothing more frustrating than being a supporter of the president and the war and having to listen to the liberal critique of what was happening in Iraq because, in large part, they were right: the war was bungled and things were going terribly.
But with Petraeus and the surge and the Anbar Awakening and the dismantling of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the defeat of the Sadrists and the turning of the Sunni militias…everything’s looking up. I don’t want to say we feel vindicated (after all, there’s still a long way to go and it could all go to hell at any minute), but it would be nice to get an acknowledgment out of the Democratic party and its presumptive standard bearer that things have changed.
Which brings me to the dialogue between Jennifer Rubin and Andrew Sullivan over whether or not Barack Obama is “George Bush in Reverse.” I, for one, would like to hope that if he gets into the Oval Office, sees the facts on the ground, and recognizes exactly where we are in Iraq, Obama would throw the brakes on the precipitous withdrawal he has planned. He’s a very smart man, and I don’t think he wants to abandon the Iraqis to genocide and/or Iranian dominance (especially since we’re the ones who went in there and smashed up the place to begin with).
What Rubin fails to realize, I think, is that Obama can’t come out against withdrawal at this point, even if things continued to improve and U.S. casualties dropped to fewer than ten a month. His fundraising/vote base on the far left would go insane. It would cost him the election. Obama might be a good and fair man, but he’s a politician first and foremost: he’s not going to alienate his base just to prove a point to us right wingers that he’s open-minded on Iraq. He has to remain willfully ignorant to win the presidency. For someone who was supposed to “transcend politics” and lead us out of the fever swamp of partisanship, it’s a disheartening turn of events–but certainly not a surprising one.