What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (35 page)

Many of Obama’s fellow leftists attacked the war, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who, while the surge was being prosecuted, proclaimed, “This war is lost.” Reid’s comment was classic kookology: that they are uniquely capable of real insight and discerning the “truth,” in this case that the war was hopeless.

Through their incessant public criticism, Democrats like Obama and Reid—and countless other leftists—undercut President Bush and the nation’s objectives in Iraq from Day One. They attacked Bush, lied about him and his motivations for going to war, and threatened him and the funding for his military and foreign policies. They did everything they could to destroy him and the war he was leading for their own political advantage. But what they didn’t seem to get—or chose to ignore—is that political parties don’t lose wars; countries do. Reid was willing to have the
United States
lose a war so the Republican president got the blame. The problem with that is that the enemy didn’t see Republican and Democrat, it saw only the United States and an entire faction of the U.S. government inclined to let them win in Iraq. In this sense, the natural position of the Left is to aid and abet the enemy. They know that the enemy can hear them through the press. And by making statements such as Harry Reid’s “The war is lost,” they’re acting as the enemy’s getaway driver.

When the Iraqis went to the polls to vote in provincial elections just one week after Obama’s inauguration, the Left was silent. There was no rejoicing that the much-maligned Bush surge had brought a measure of stability to the country or that the war itself had ushered in a decent, if not perfect, representative government. Their silence indicated just how much they wanted Reid’s assertion to be true. It can be debated as to whether the price in blood and treasure that we paid to beat back a vicious, persistent insurgency and establish Iraq’s democracy was worth it. But the reality is that the only functioning Arab democracy is the one built by the United States in Iraq—as long as the precipitous Obama withdrawal doesn’t destroy it. Although its government is highly imperfect and fragile, Iraq has had competitive elections and, until very recently, the freest press in the region. Our efforts, and the sacrifices of countless American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, created the conditions for the Iraqi people to have a shot at some form of self-governance.

The Persian and Arab peoples were watching. Their regimes were watching too. There were reports that the Iranian government was terrified that the Americans were going to take a turn to the east and overthrow it as well. At the most basic military strategic level, the bookends of Iraq and Afghanistan acted as a vise grip on Iran. Tehran was pinned in from both sides in case the Axis of Evil country decided to move beyond its borders. Regimes across the region were petrified that the democracy bug that had bitten the Iraqi people would bite their people too, and if the wave of democracy were allowed to spread—with or without direct U.S. help—the Middle East and the Muslim world would be revolutionized.

Not that “democracy” is a panacea. In the Gaza Strip, a democratic vote gave power to Hamas. But citizens in democracies eventually learn that their vote carries consequences. When Bush went into Iraq, he cracked the entire Middle East open. In the short and medium term, it led to chaos and upheaval, but in the longer term, it led to a potentially more stable Iraq and a more widespread regional demand for freedom, as seen in the earliest days of the so-called Arab “Spring.”

None of this strategic nuance mattered much to Obama. The majority of Americans agreed that after seven years of war, it was time to pack it in, let the Iraqis run their own state, and bring the troops home. And so it was with great political confidence and personal self-satisfaction that Obama addressed the American people on that late-summer evening in 2010.

Obama could have focused the nation on the fact that we had won a lengthy and hard-fought war in Iraq, which gutted al-Qaeda there, neutralized the Shiite militias and their godfathers in Iran, inspired a growing rejection of sectarianism and embrace of nationalism, and created a relatively stable climate for regular elections. He didn’t do that. Meanwhile, all that remained on Obama’s plate was to negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement to replace the one Bush had negotiated in late 2008, which would allow a skeleton force to remain to consolidate the gains and our burgeoning alliance with the Iraqis. Take a moment the next time you hop into a BMW from Germany, a Lexus from Japan, or a Hyundai from South Korea, and remember that we still have military troops in each of those countries. The reason none of them have become failed states is that Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had the wisdom and foresight not only to help rebuild them, but to ensure a defense against future belligerence. The same was supposed to be true for Iraq.

The Iraqis wanted and expected the agreement to be renegotiated. Obama knew from Day One of his presidency that this needed to be done, as well as to provide American direction toward a centrist coalition government made up of predominantly Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish blocs that had won nearly 70 percent of the popular vote in the 2010 elections. In a show of how little he cared about the future of Iraq, Obama farmed out the critically important task of influencing the Iraqi government to Joe Biden, who promptly screwed everything up, leaving an Iraq run by a narrow sectarian coalition in which the radical Iranian-controlled Muqtada al-Sadr faction held the balance of power.

As to the status-of-forces agreement, Obama deliberately wrecked it. The ostensible reason for the collapse of the agreement was that Baghdad refused to agree to legal immunity for U.S. forces. That, however, was just the superficial excuse. With the acquiescence of the Iraqis, our military commanders had strongly recommended keeping a 20,000-troop residual force to deter the Iranians, train the Iraqis, and monitor our interests in the region. Obama wasn’t interested in doing any of those things. He just wanted to get out, regardless of the ultimate cost of losing a vastly important strategic interest and creating a power vacuum into which Tehran quickly and effectively would step. The Iraqis were stunned by Obama’s carelessness and disregard, as Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd must have turned to one another and asked, “What the @$%&! just happened?” In fact, the Iraqi government realized that it had to save the kook from his own bad decisions, so they quietly requested that a small U.S. training force stay in-country.

Obama, the man who claimed he would reject Bush’s hard-power cowboyism for smart-power diplomacy showed neither smarts nor good diplomacy. As the new commander in chief, Obama had the responsibility to turn America’s great sacrifice in Iraq into a long-term strategic win. Instead, he
deliberately
lost Iraq for the United States. He wanted us to ultimately fail there—for both political and strategic reasons—and he made sure it happened. He threw our hard-fought sacrifice into history’s dustbin, and with it he accomplished his true goal: downgrading U.S. power in the region and the world. It turns out that Reid’s declaration that “the war was lost” wasn’t entirely wrong; it was probably just premature.

While he was selling out Iraq, Obama was also busy pulling the rug out from under our war effort in Afghanistan. Savor the irony: the antiwar president expanded the war in Afghanistan by ordering a surge of the kind he criticized scathingly in Iraq. Obama being Obama, however, he couldn’t simply order an increase in troops along with a directive to achieve victory. No, Obama being Obama, he simultaneously announced the surge
and
the withdrawal, the plan to fight
and
the plan to exit, the commitment
and
the commitment phobia. He’s the charming cad who says he’ll call, then never does.

Long before he ran for president in 2008 and throughout that campaign, Obama cast Afghanistan as the “good war” in order to contrast it with Bush’s “bad war” in Iraq. He constantly criticized the Bush administration for taking its “eye off the ball” of terrorism in Afghanistan and suggested that he would have surged troops there, where it counted, rather than in Iraq where, after all, the war was already “lost.” Once he was elected president, Obama realized that he was now in a box of his own making. After three painfully long months of Hamlet-like indecision, Obama decided to surge 30,000 troops—tens of thousands of troops fewer than what the commanding generals requested—into Afghanistan, not because he wanted to but because he had to, lest his campaign word be broken and a perception grow that he was a typical kook, weak on national security.

Obama’s heart, however, was never in the fight. That’s why he gave only one major address about Afghanistan and never spoke about it again at any length. He sort of pretended that his surge wasn’t happening. But if you’re the commander in chief and you’re sending our selfless men and women into expanded combat operations, you’d better believe in the mission. And you’d better fight to win, or you’ve got no business being commander in chief.

In October 2009, while Obama was still contemplating his navel over what to do in Afghanistan, the commanding general there had a tough time getting the president’s attention. After all, he wasn’t a member of the International Olympic Committee, a golf ball, or Jennifer Lopez.

Given those self-indulgent presidential distractions, General Stanley McChrystal could be forgiven for airing publicly his strategic and troop-level preferences. Appearing on
60 Minutes
and addressing a prestigious London think tank apparently were the only ways General McChrystal could get Obama’s attention. It was the general as matador, waving the red silk, hoping the bull would turn and notice him.

The bull certainly noticed. After the general’s disclosure that he had spoken to the commander in chief only once in the nearly hundred days he had the Afghanistan command, Obama then spoke to him twice: once by secure TeleLink and again aboard an idle Air Force One in Denmark for a twenty-five-minute discussion. So here was a four-star general who had been in uniform since 1976. A man who killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. A West Point graduate with awards like the Defense Distinguished Service Medal. And President Barry gives him less time than he devotes to the average sit-down with Jay Leno.

Reports of the conversation said it involved a “candid exchange of views,” which probably meant that General McChrystal reiterated his request for up to 40,000 additional troops in order to accomplish the goal of destroying al-Qaeda, turning back the Taliban, and stabilizing Afghanistan, while Obama requested more time to think.

In his London speech, General McChrystal was brutally honest about the consequences of failing to adopt the surge strategy. The country, he said, will quickly become “Chaos-istan.” He summarily rejected the strategy advocated by Vice President Joe Biden to reduce troop levels and rely primarily on drone missile strikes, saying, “The short answer is no,” when asked if he’d ever support it.

He also said, “Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support.”

The White House was said to be “furious” with the general’s public comments, with some commentators suggesting that his comments bordered on “insubordination.” Obama’s national security adviser, General James Jones, was more careful, saying, “Ideally, it’s best for military advice to come up through the chain of command.”

General McChrystal could be forgiven his impatience. Obama had ten months as president to get off the fence. He said repeatedly, including in January, March, and June 2009 (when he installed General McChrystal), that he had a “new strategy.” When the general realized there wasn’t a plan, he himself prepared one, which had been public for several weeks before he took to the airwaves. The only way McChrystal could have gotten to Obama sooner was if he mounted an attack on ESPN headquarters and commandeered a
SportsCenter
broadcast to present his Afghan war strategy.

Obama knew that McChrystal was onto him, so when the general gave the president the ammunition with which to destroy him, Obama used it. Just eight months after the general openly stated the troop levels he’d need in Afghanistan,
Rolling Stone
reported some impolitic criticisms McChrystal and some of his aides made about the commander in chief and a few of his top advisers. The general was summoned to Washington for a terse meeting at the White House, during which he was relieved of his command. The counterinsurgency genius behind the successful Iraq surge, General David Petraeus, was asked to take a demotion from being commander of U.S. Central Command to run the Afghanistan war in McChrystal’s stead, and Petraeus agreed. Both generals must have said, “What the @$%&! just happened?”

Obama never laid out what victory in Afghanistan might look like—and his generals knew it. As he announced he was getting more in, he also announced he was getting out because, as with Iraq, that’s what he wanted to do all along. According to his game plan, approximately 33,000 troops will be home from Afghanistan in time for the 2012 election. The Afghan troop withdrawal isn’t in the national interest. It’s in Barack Obama’s interest.

On December 1, 2009, Obama gave his only comprehensive speech on Afghanistan, delivered in front of hundreds of cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point. As he spoke, the camera panned the audience, capturing two moments that came to symbolize Obama’s Afghanistan policy. One cadet was caught napping through the speech. Yes, the man once considered the Greatest Orator of All Time put strapping young warriors to sleep. Another cadet was spied reading a book while Obama spoke. It wasn’t Heidi Montag’s
How to Be Famous
or
Suzanne Somers’ Eat Great, Lose Weight
. No, the West Point cadet was reading
Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man
. That image said it all: the baby-faced cadet had more apparent fight in him, more passion for the cause, more urgency on behalf of his country, than the commander in chief under whom he was about to serve.