Vice President Biden has called Iraq possibly one of the great achievements of the Obama administration. Amidst the deeply moving lamentations of the Obama administration that they "inherited" our current economic problems from Bush and Bush alone (there are no Democrats in Congress with their fingerprints on past policies, apparently; which is actually more credible given Senate Majority Leader Reid's budget passivity the last few years), let's remember that victory was an inheritance that Bush did leave--over Congressional Democrat objections--to President Obama.
While that inheritance may prove to be large enough to get to final victory despite President Obama, President Obama has squandered much of that inheritance and put our efforts at risk:
Without American forces to train and assist Iraqi commandos, the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq is still active in Iraq and is increasingly involved in Syria. With no American aircraft to patrol Iraqi airspace, Iraq has become a corridor for Iranian flights of military supplies to Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, American officials say. It is also a potential avenue for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, something the White House is laboring to avoid.
Ryan C. Crocker, the former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, offered his own perspective on the last tortured negotiations in the country where American troops fought for more than eight years. “I don’t think either government handled it as well as it could have been handled,” he said. “The U.S. side came to it late. You have got to leave a lot of latitude for difficulties, foreseen and unforeseen. On the Iraqi side, they should have said, ‘If you want this don’t try to determine our own procedures.’ ”
Ah, "smart" diplomacy.
