End of War in Iraq! FINALLY

[Jersey #10]

So Obama keeps the promise and announces the end of the Iraq war by the end of this year. Funny part is that, we don't have jobs for the people who are already here and he's planning to dump some 100,000 more people in the jobs market. Let's see what happens. I suspect he's just throwing curve balls at the GOP candidates for the 2012 elections. They made sure that his "jobs bill" didn't pass but they can't really do much about what Obama does with the wars and the troops. :sherlock: GOP will try to contest this in the next debate and make even bigger fools out of themselves. Their debates ought to be on Comedy Central :giggle:

[yoda]

About time really. A war which was not necessary, costing trillions, is finally over. Thank goodness.

[Brainfade]

I have been a steadfast opponent of the war and an ardent critic of the Bush administration for going into Iraq. But I have also been steadfast in my praise for Bush for 2 things: (a) The surge, which made a withdrawal timetable possible. (b) The agreement that Bush signed with Iraq in Nov 2008, which set Dec 31, 2011 as a date for withdrawal. Not that these facts will make a lick's worth of difference on this board. I only request that you read the 3 articles in their entirety before countering my points. Regardless, let Obama go ahead and take the credit for it. He had no choice; he asked for an extension, but Iraq would not give legal protection to our troops, and he is forced to pull them out. I am just happy it is done.

It's no longer a close call: President Bush was right about the surge. According to Michael O'Hanlon and Jason Campbell of the Brookings Institution, the number of Iraqi war dead was 500 in November of 2008, compared with 3,475 in November of 2006. That same month, 69 Americans died in Iraq; in November 2008, 12 did. Violence in Anbar province is down more than 90 percent over the past two years, the New York Times reports. Returning to Iraq after long absences, respected journalists Anthony Shadid and Dexter Filkins say they barely recognize the place. Is the surge solely responsible for the turnaround? Of course not. Al-Qaeda alienated the Sunni tribes; Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army decided to stand down; the United States assassinated key insurgent and militia leaders, all of which mattered as much if not more than the increase in U.S. troops. And the decline in violence isn't necessarily permanent. Iraq watchers warn that communal distrust remains high; if someone strikes a match, civil war could again rage out of control. Moreover, even if the calm endures, that still doesn't justify the Bush administration's initial decision to go to war, which remains one of the great blunders in American foreign policy history. But if Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record, his decision to increase America's troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in Washington and the country as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous. It's time for Democrats to say so. During the campaign they rarely did for fear of jeopardizing Barack Obama's chances of winning the presidency. But today, the hesitation is less tactical than emotional. Most Democrats think Bush has been an atrocious president, and they want to usher him out of office with the jeers he so richly deserves. Even if they suspect, in their heart of hearts, that he was right about the surge, they don't want to give him the satisfaction. Yet they should -- not for his sake but for their own. Because Bush has been such an unusually bad president, an entire generation of Democrats now takes it for granted that on the big questions, the right is always wrong. Older liberals remember the Persian Gulf War, which most congressional Democrats opposed and most congressional Republicans supported -- and the Republicans were proven right. They also remember the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, when prominent liberals predicted disaster, and disaster didn't happen. Younger liberals, by contrast, have had no such chastening experiences. Watching the Bush administration flit from disaster to disaster, they have grown increasingly dismissive of conservatives in the process. They consume partisan media, where Republican malevolence is taken for granted. They laugh along with the "Colbert Report," the whole premise of which is that conservatives are bombastic, chauvinistic and dumb. They have never had the ideologically humbling experience of watching the people whose politics they loathe be proven right. In this way, they are a little like the Bushies themselves. One reason the Bush administration fell prey to such monumental hubris was that it didn't take its critics seriously. Convinced that the Reagan years had forever vindicated deregulated capitalism and unfettered American might, the Bushies blithely dismissed liberals who warned about deregulation, or Europeans who warned about military force, on the grounds that history had consistently proved those critics wrong. "You want to know what I really think of the Europeans?" a top Bush official declared during the Iraq debate. "I think they have been wrong on just about every major international issue for the past 20 years." Today, by contrast, it is conservatives who have been proven wrong again and again. Politically and intellectually, the right is discredited, and the arguments of its rump minority in Congress will be easy to dismiss. Liberal self-confidence is sky-high. That's why it's important to admit that Bush was right about the surge. Doing so would remind Democrats that no one political party, or ideological perspective, has a monopoly on wisdom. That recognition can be the difference between ambition -- which the Obama presidency must exhibit -- and hubris, which it can ill afford. Being proven right too many times is dangerous. It breeds intellectual arrogance and complacency. As the Democrats prepare to take over Washington, they should publicly acknowledge that on the surge, they were wrong. That acknowledgment may not do much for Bush's legacy, but it could do wonders for their own.

Peter Beinart today bravely repeats the emerging would-be conventional wisdom. Rather than simply denounce everything Republican, he argues, Democrats should admit that the "surge" worked and -- uniquely echoing a thousand recent op-eds -- was President Bush's finest moment. I have a hard time imagining anything as tedious as rehashing those tired debates from the campaign about the "surge" -- perhaps we could have another round of arguments as to whether the surge brigades arriving in the spring of 2007 caused the Sunni turn against al-Qaeda in the fall of 2006? But in the interests of post-partisanship, I am willing to offer an alternative as Bush's finest hour in Iraq: the Status of Forces Agreement. Signing a Status of Forces Agreement requiring the full withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq on a fixed three year timeline demonstrated a real flexibility on Bush's part. It demonstrated a pragmatism and willingness to put the national interest ahead of partisanship that few of us believed he possessed. It is largely thanks to Bush's acceptance of his own bargaining failure that Barack Obama will inherit a plausible route to successful disengagement from Iraq. Conservatives now like to claim the SOFA as a "Bush-negotiated" success. But Bush entered the SOFA negotiations looking for something entirely different than what emerged at the end. The U.S. went into the SOFA talks intent on obtaining legitimacy for a long-term military presence in Iraq once the Security Council mandate ended. When negotiations began, it was widely assumed that Bush would extract from the Iraqis an agreement which made the removal of U.S. troops entirely contingent upon American assessments of conditions on the ground. There were widespread discussions of permanent U.S. bases and a Korea-style presence for generations, an assumption that the U.S. would retain a free hand in its operations, and an absolute rejection of an Obama-style timeline for withdrawal. But Iraqi leaders, to most everyone's surprise, took a hard line in the negotiations. Their tough line was encouraged by Iran, no doubt, as stressed by many frustrated American commentators. But it also reflected Iraqi domestic considerations, including several rounds of upcoming elections and an intensely strong popular Iraqi hostility to the U.S. occupation under any name. The Iraqis were also helped by the calender. As negotiations dragged on, the December 31 deadline loomed large, threatening to leave the U.S. troops without any legal mandate to remain in the country and forcing the hand of American negotiators. Finally, the Iraqi leaders clearly kept a careful eye on the American Presidential elections and used Obama's stance to strengthen their own hand in negotiations. And here's where I will offer some sincere praise for Bush and his team. When the Iraqis insisted on an Obama-style timeline for U.S. withdrawal instead of a Bush/McCain- style conditions-based aspirational time frame for U.S. withdrawal, he could have insisted on the latter. This would have fit with his administration's often-repeated preferences. He could have continued to push for this conception closer to the December 31 deadline, playing high-stakes chicken at the expense of American military planning for the coming year and at the risk of the Iraqi political system not having adequate time to ratify the deal. But he didn't. To his credit, Bush agreed to the Obama-style timeline for U.S. withdrawal. Granted, he hedged -- he didn't authorize Ambassador Ryan Crocker to sign off on the deal until after the Presidential election (on November 18). But at that point he bowed to the political realities in the U.S. and Iraq and agreed to a SOFA which far more closely matched Obama's avowed vision for Iraq -- withdrawal of U.S. forces in three years, no permanent bases -- than his own. Thanks to this pragmatism, Obama can now work closely with the Iraqi government in managing the drawdown instead of spending his first months in office trying to wriggle out of an unacceptable deal. And this, I might speculate, is among the reasons why Robert Gates will continue as Secretary of Defense. And thus I offer Bush's willingness to sign the SOFA mandating U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, and not the surge, as his finest moment in Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/world/middleeast/united-states-cuts-back-proposed-size-of-force-in-iraq.html

The officials said the administrationÃÔ plans changed in recent weeks as it became clear that the Iraqi Parliament would not give legal immunity to the American troops, something the Pentagon had insisted would be needed if troops were to continue to operate here. Two weeks ago, the leaders of the Iraqi political blocs said they wanted American troops to remain to train the Iraqi military after the yearÃÔ end, but would not provide them legal protections.

[Brainfade]

So Obama keeps the promise and announces the end of the Iraq war by the end of this year. Funny part is that, we don't have jobs for the people who are already here and he's planning to dump some 100,000 more people in the jobs market. Let's see what happens. I suspect he's just throwing curve balls at the GOP candidates for the 2012 elections. They made sure that his "jobs bill" didn't pass but they can't really do much about what Obama does with the wars and the troops. :sherlock: GOP will try to contest this in the next debate and make even bigger fools out of themselves. Their debates ought to be on Comedy Central :giggle:

It was a 50-50 vote in the Senate. He cannot convince all of his own guys in the Senate to vote for another half-a-trillion dollar behemoth of a bill.

[punjabi_khota]

"But if Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record, his decision to increase America's troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour." :hahaha: That ladies and gentlemen, is what the Oxford Dictionary calls 'Polishing the turd'

[Brainfade]

"But if Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record' date= his decision to increase America's troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour." :hahaha: That ladies and gentlemen, is what the Oxford Dictionary calls 'Polishing the turd'

Classic instance of the reluctance to give credit where credit is due.

[punjabi_khota]

Classic instance of the reluctance to give credit where credit is due.

Credit for what ? For cleaning up his own shyte after killing a million people, burning a few trillion dollars and filling up Cheney's pockets ? Sure,Bush is the man. As I said, it IS the very definition of polishing the turd.

[Brainfade]

Credit for what ? For cleaning up his own shyte after killing a million people, burning a few trillion dollars and filling up Cheney's pockets ? Sure,Bush is the man. As I said, it IS the very definition of polishing the turd.

If you read my post with any semblance of an attention span, you'd note that I have been anti Iraq war, and am extremely critical of the Bush admin for venturing into this. Didn't nevah say Bush da man, dude. But, he did what he had to in order to get things in order as much as he could. And for the Obama administration to stake 100% claim for "ending the war" is disingenuous. The foundation for the end was laid on Nov 18, 2008. Two months before BHO took office. This admin is trying to milk the situation for all it is worth - like they planned the withdrawal all by themselves - and you are playing along. Bottom line? Villains all. What I just don't get is the single-minded devotion to Obama and his cronies on this board.

[Ram]

Dumb, useless war that was founded on blatant lies and mis-information about WMDs that never existed in the first place... The human cost of this war has been immense - lhe lives of 2,00,000 Iraqis, 5000 coalition soldiers were consumed, not to forget countless injured civilians and men and women in uniform. To think that people are trying to take credit for an unmitagated disasted is incredible.

[punjabi_khota]

I am not playing along. I don't think ANYONE is going to give Obama much credit for ending the war. FWIW, the war was meandering to its end. He may try to milk it all he can, but that is expected when everything else is not going to plan.

Bottom line? Villains all. What I just don't get is the single-minded devotion to Obama and his cronies on this board

WTF man. One guy has blood of atleast 200K people on his hands, while the other guy has been accused of claiming to end to the war when he didn't do much. So , they are both categorized as just villians and put in SAME category ? :hahaha: