In pulling the US military out of Iraq, the president is doing what he said he would do. If it all works out, he will be able to trumpet his success in safely bringing the troops back. But if he turns out to have squandered the peace after so many sacrificed so much to win the war, there won’t be much doubt about who lost Iraq.
Iraq without our continued military presence might turn out just fine. I think our odds are better with our continued presence. But I don't think we are doomed.
Who knows? Maybe Japan, Germany, Italy, and South Korea would have turned out just fine without our military presence for the last 5 or 6 decades. But why take the chance when the continued investment is so small?
And really, why would President Obama want to take the risk of something going horribly bad before the November election? I at least hoped that partisan political motives would lead the president to want to avoid obvious responsibility for any failure in Iraq. Keeping even the low figure of 10,000 in Iraq after this year seems like a small defiance of his rabid anti-war base to be able to argue (whether true or not) that he did all he could to ensure success.
But with no American troops on the ground and every indication that President Obama just didn't care enough to work at forging a new agreement with Iraq, his finger prints will be all over the corpse of a dead Iraqi democracy if things go wrong.
Good grief, is the president cynical enough to think that nothing bad can happen before the election so it is a good gamble? And if he is taking that gamble, would he turn on his anti-war base to return American forces to Iraq after the election when the anti-war base can be told to take a hike?
UPDATE: Well, that was fast. Is this the fear in action?
The government of Iraq continued to respond vigorously on Monday to a tip from the new interim leaders in Libya that former members of Saddam Hussein’s military and Baath Party were plotting a coup — so much so that critics are now saying that the information has become a pretext for arresting its political opponents.
As the overwhelming majority of high-ranking Baathists were Sunnis, the mass arrests by the Shiite-controlled government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is fanning sectarian tensions, just six weeks before the United States military is scheduled to withdraw its last soldiers.
Not that the fear of a Baathist coup is completely unfounded. The Sunni Arabs believe they should rule Iraq--as they did for centuries until 2003. But would the Shia rulers have carried out the arrests if they felt they had our safety net securely in place? Certainly, the Sunni Arabs would have less to worry about if we remain. And if the plot is true, did our imminent departure prompt the plot out of fear?
Leaving Iraq is a gamble by the Obama administration. Mind you, even a Shia-led crackdown that leads to authoritarian Shia government in Baghdad is still a narrow victory over having Saddam's anti-American regime in power. But we could achieve so much more with the example of an Iraqi democracy for the region to see.
I keep hoping cooler heads will prevail in Baghdad and Washington, and we'll see an agreement hammered out before it is too late.
