O Blows It by Iraq, Misque

Graham: U.S. needed Iraqi foothold that prez abandoned

Thursday, August 29, 2013 -- Anonymous (not verified)

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Op-Ed

Friday, August 30, 2013

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Michael Graham

More than 70 years after the start of World War II, America has 100,000 troops stationed at bases in Germany and Japan. More than 50 years after the cease-fire in Korea, we have nearly 30,000 American military stationed there.

But in Iraq, where we toppled Saddam just a decade ago and oversaw three national elections, there isn’t a single American combat soldier left. A fact President Obama has repeatedly celebrated.

Now imagine the world today — the exploding Egypt, sarin-gas Syria, bombs-in-Benghazi world — if Obama had treated Iraq the way America treated Germany, Japan and Korea. Imagine the Middle East with a fully functioning U.S. military base on the border of Iran and Syria, able to project power right on Bashar Assad and the ayatollahs’ doorsteps.

Alas, we can only imagine …

Syria, as bad as it is, isn’t even close to the greatest foreign policy failure of the Obama administration. It’s a symptom of Obama’s abandonment of the region. And the high (low?) point of that policy was Obama’s decision to abandon the moderate, pro-Western citizens of Iraq to the extremists.

Obama’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq will be viewed by history as one of the greatest foreign policy blunders of all time.

Please don’t start the tired “Bush Lied, People Died” nonsense. Forget the faulty intelligence on Iraq’s WMD program. Even if you lie in bed at night sticking pins in your “W” voodoo doll, it’s irrational to ignore the pragmatic value of a U.S. military force in a U.S.-leaning Iraq in the heart of the mess that is Obama’s “Arab Spring” Middle East.

Having 10,000 trained, intelligence-gathering troops bolstering the flagging courage of timid (small “d”) democrats and rattling the nerves of despots and terrorists is a good thing — no matter how we got there.

So why are they gone? War fatigue? We had plenty of that after World War II — but we’re still in Germany. Americans didn’t exactly rally around the Korean conflict at the time, but even after that “forgotten war,” we’re spending about $7 billion a year to stay.

The costs of “Bush’s unfunded war”? An administration whose smallest annual deficit ($759 billion) is larger than the biggest one we’d ever seen before is hardly in the penny-pinching business.

No, we gave up this invaluable geo-strategic opportunity and abandoned Muslim moderates to the Islamists for the worst reason possible: Petty politics.

Because it was Bush, the war was bad. Because it was bad, the troops had to come home. Such is the juvenile “strategery” of the Smartest President Ever.

Only now, we’ve got the Obama administration going full “W,” arguing for U.S. military action against Syria without U.N. approval or — a line even Bush didn’t cross — congressional authority.

I remember when Joe Biden was throwing around the “I” word over talk like that. (“Impeachment,” although in Biden’s case it could easily be “Einstein” or “aisle.”)

As of Wednesday morning, the White House was leaking like a broken sieve that there was “no doubt” the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical weapons attack that slaughtered innocent children. And, therefore, military action was imminent.

By Thursday afternoon, we were being told that Obama “had not made a decision,” and liberal lapdogs like U.S. Sen. Liz Warren were unwilling even to say the president should make the case to Congress.

Who knows where we’ll be by the time you read this — inviting Assad to another swanky dinner with the Kerrys?

Here’s what won’t change: The limited options we have, in part because we abandoned our hard-won place in Iraq as part of an unrealistic Obama hope that the troubles of the Middle East would just go away.

Listen to Michael Graham weekdays noon to 3 p.m. on BostonHeraldRadio.com or follow him on