I know, news flash … Still, I read him daily and find him interesting and provocative, and actually often correct. But this post really is odd. He's correct that the Iraqi's hard-and-fast deadline for American withdrawal takes a degree of political heat off Obama. But isn't there something funny about the emphasis in this sentence?
The usual suspects – Reynolds, Hanson, Krauthammer, Kagan – will be unable to say that the chaos and mass murder that will almost certainly follow in 2010 and 2011 is Obama's responsibility. It isn't.
IOW, “Innocents will be butchered, but it's not my guy's fault. Boo-ya!” Yeah, I sure don't get that attitude. Seems to me it becomes that much more urgent for Obama to do all he can to avoid that slaughter, even if it's not his doing.
Furthermore, his anti-Clinton hatred is so intense, it leads to this:
And the genius of appointing Clinton as secretary-of-state is that she will have to absorb the blows of failure. Think of a possible Obama State Department offer to Clinton this way:
“You voted for this bloody war. Now you can end it.”
So … Obama should appoint Clinton to SOS out of spite? Gah?
Man, there is a hell of a lot more to the future of Iraq than the settling of domestic political scores — or even more trivially, blogosphere scores. Even in the best-case scenario, Obama's going to have to engage there in a significant way — simply if we want to avoid a failed state becoming another nuisance to us, or a humanitarian catastrophe inevitably laid at our feet. Whether or not our military physically occupies Iraq, Colin Powell is still right — you break it, you bought it.
Anyway, I trust that my readership (all three of you) will alert me if and when I start to rave in a similar manner. Thanks in advance.
The other strange thing is his claim that it is inevitable that there will be “chaos and mass murder” following the American withdrawal from Iraq. It is possible, but unlikely.
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p>Much of the downturn in violence over the past months likely has less to do with changes in the American presence (though the troops are doing an outstanding job) and more to do with the fact that Sunni and Shia have self-segregated. It’s not a pleasant fact, but it’s something unlikely to change if the US reduces the number of troops.
I remember he was a super hawk about Afghanistan, and he was a huge Bush apologist and “Rummy” fan leading up to Iraq. I stopped reading him around then. How did he manage to reverse course?