In an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine released Saturday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said U.S. troops should leave Iraq “as soon as possible” and he called presidential candidate Barack Obama’s suggestion of 16 months “the right timeframe for a withdrawal.” The national security adviser to the Obama campaign, Susan Rice, said the senator welcomed Maliki’s support, saying, “This presents an important opportunity to transition to Iraqi responsibility, while restoring our military and increasing our commitment to finish the fight in Afghanistan.”
Iraqi spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh quickly stated that Maliki’s comments had been “misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately.” Max Boot analyzes Maliki’s statement and subsequent clarification and context over at Contentions.
Nevertheless, we can full expect Obama and his supporters to argue that Maliki’s words, despite the clarification, are a vindication of Obama’s position. Any such effort would be ludicrous, and an analogy might help us understand why.
Assume that your child was ill and had a fever. You took him to the doctor and the primary physician recommended medication. Another doctor, not the primary physician, said medication wasn’t needed and, in fact, it would be counterproductive. The fever continued; in response, the child’s physician increased the dosage of medication (over the objections of the second doctor). The child’s condition continued to worsen, to the point that you took your child to the hospital. Medication was then combined with other interventions, over the strong objections of the second doctor. In fact, the second doctor not only recommended against medication, he felt at this stage the child was a lost cause and it would be a waste to devote much more effort on the child’s behalf.
Slowly, however, the child, because of the increased medication and other interventions, began to improve. In a few days, in fact, he was released from the hospital, with the fever going down. Finally the child got to the point where he was healthy enough that the primary physician said he now envisioned that the child would soon be able to come off the medication, provided we continued to see conditions-based progress. Now imagine if the second doctor declared that because the child would one day be off medication, he had been right all along. Such a claim would be absurd; the child would have gotten worse, and probably would have died, if the secondary doctor’s recommendation had been followed. The child’s recovery demonstrated why the secondary doctor’s judgment was deeply and dangerous flawed rather than right.
We have something similar happening with Obama and Iraq. He was a relentless critic of the surge, even after it was clear the surge was not only working, but working beyond the expectations of even those who championed it. John McCain was (rightly) arguing for the surge long before it was endorsed; and when the President, in the face of ferocious opposition, decided on the surge, the entire Democratic Party lined up against it.
We are now seeing the good fruits of the Petraeus-led effort and, if things continue on their present course, we may be able to accelerate the drawdown of troops (which of course has already begun; General Petraeus announced months ago that he was recommending that we withdraw five brigade combat teams, more than a quarter of our total number of combat troops, from Iraq, which we are in the process of completing).
For Obama and his campaign, however, to believe that Maliki’s words are a vindication of his “judgment to lead” is misguided. Obama was wrong – consistently and spectacularly wrong – on the most important national security decision since the Iraq war began. What Maliki said doesn’t change that fact and, in some ways, it underscores it.
Obama’s record on Iraq and the surge is intellectually dishonest and reckless. We can only be glad that his plan, which would have removed all combat troops from Iraq in March 2008, was never put in place, and the defeat he would have authored has not come to pass.