Vice President-elect Joseph Biden (D-DE) reportedly used a visit to Baghdad yesterday to assure Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki that Barack Obama’s incoming administration has every inention of precisely following the post-Iraq-conflict blueprint drawn up and implemented by the Bush administration last year.
According to Iraqi spokesperson Ali al-Dabbagh, Biden told Maliki that “the new administration will stick to the timetable [for U.S. troop withdrawal] in the [U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces] agreement” negotiated by Bush and approved by the Iraqi parliament last fall, adding that the incoming president, though still committed to withdrawal, now “wants the withdrawal to be a responsible one,” and that he “does not want to waste the security gains that have been achieved.” The SOFA lays out a plan for U.S. combat forces to remain in Iraq into 2012, and allows for an even longer stay if the situation on the ground warrants it.
This latest Iraq promise bears little resemblance to Barack Obama’s past statements and actions, like sponsoring legislation to remove all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by March 2008, thereby abandoning millions of Iraqi civilians to grisly fates at the hands of foreign-born and domestic terrorists; opposing a radical change in direction made up of a ’surge’ in forces and a commitment by General David Petraeus to emphasize counterinsurgency in Iraq (though record of that opposition was scrubbed from his campaign website when it became politically inconvenient); and both refusing to admit that the new strategy was succeeding and then, even after begrudgingly admitting gains had been made in the Arab state, mming the head-scratching claim that he would still oppose the successful change in course if, even knowing ahead of time that it would (in his words) “succeed beyond our wildest dreams,” he were presented with the opportunity to do so again.
Speaking of bearing little resemblance to past statements and actions, all four of those Obama positions and statements are worlds away from the claim Joe Biden made in September that he and Obama had actually come up with the strategy being used by Petraeus in Iraq, and that they — he and “Barack” — were ultimately responsible for its success. At the time he made that outlandish statement, I wrote the following:
“This revelation suggests that we are to view the actions of both of these men with regard to Iraq in a new light.
For example, I suppose we are now expected to believe that when Biden said, “The president and others who support the surge have it exactly backwards,” in December 2006, he secretly meant, “Go through with the surge, Gen. Petraeus — I believe in you!”
Or, when Biden was pushing for Iraq to be divided into into three ethnically-homogeneous, unsustainable “states,” then abandoned, he was actually working behind the scenes with the freshman Senator from Illinois and General Petraeus to craft a plan to make Iraq more unified and sustainable.
We are likewise expected to believe that, when Barack Obama sponsored legislation that would have withdrawn U.S. troops from that country beginning last year — at the most sensitive point to date in the entire conflict — with a full retreat having been completed by this past March, thereby rendering every single achievement made possible by the ‘Surge,’ from the rising up of Concerned Local Citizens, to the driving out of al Qaeda in Iraq, to the quelling of sectarian violence, to the growing political reconciliation that made possible legislation passed this week setting the stage for provincial elections in that country, entirely null and void, he was actually laying the ground work for success there. Good thing General Petraeus was somehow in on the secret there, and understood that all of Obama’s posturing was actually cover for Petraeus to do what he has done to date in Iraq.”
The truth is, though he was nominated in large part for his firm anti-Iraq stances, President-elect Obama and his chosen team have been all over the map on the issue, with the only consistency being that, as his Senate tenure quickly gave way to a primary, the primary gave way to the general election, the general election gave way to the transition, and the transition in turn gave way to the inauguration, his position has become farther and farther right, to the point at which, now, his position and apparent chosen Iraq policy are largely indistinguishable from those of his predecessor.
I doubt that’s what Democrats and allied third-party activists like MoveOn, CodePink, and so many others had in mind when they fought so hard to get Barack Obama elected. If this rightward shift on Iraq continues, though — and if it continues pervading his administration’s foreign policy as a whole — then, while the far-Left may have license to gripe and to claim they were hoodwinked by a candidate who claimed to share their belief in kowtowing to tyrants and blaming America for the world’s problems, the mainstream of this country will have cause for optimism on the international front, knowing that their president and commander in chief is yielding to reality in the realm of foreign policy, rather than attempting to shoehorn an unwilling world into an unrealistically liberal worldview.
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