Obama’s Plan for Withdrawal Replaces Living Victorious Strategy with Dead Strategy

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Obama is no leader but a pretender! The sentence in the first paragraph of his Op-Ed in the NT on July 14, 2008, says it all. “The phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated,” which he trumpeted before the surge, he continues to consider as being wise in conditions when the surge has been successful in subduing the insurgency and decisively defeating al Qaeda in Iraq (his goal), and the Iraqi government meeting 15 out of the 18 benchmarks set up by Congress.

Further, he fabricates a grand fiction when he states that “nearly every threat we face-has grown.” If this was true one would have expected that America would have been attacked at least once since 9/11. And he distorts the real goal of the surge which was to win the war, and inevitably that would involve some strain in the overall number of U.S. military forces, and not because, the reason why he opposed the surge, it would not ease “the strain on our military.” Did Obama expect to win a war without perforce some strain on the military?

Obama’s op-ed is redolent with hypocrisy and cant to justify his pro-surge position, and to transpose this position in the new situation of a victorious war in Iraq as continuing to be politically and strategically viable is laughable. It is no less than the attempt of someone to resuscitate a dead carcass which unceremoniously is fit for burial and to give it a ‘second life’ in the overwhelming liveliness of victory.

Obama’s plan for withdrawal rides on the ignorant and obtuse brain-wave of populism that is against the war justified to an extent by the initial mistakes of its strategists in the conduct of the war. But now that these mistakes have been addressed and corrected by the new strategy of the surge which is defeating the insurgency, for Obama to stick to his populist promise to pull out U.S. troops from Iraq in sixteen months in this new situation, is to lead from the tail and not from the front the American people.

And in American history Obama will be everlastingly cursed for being the only Commander-in-Chief who ignominiously and doltishly withdrew his magnificent brave soldiers from a war at the threshold of its victory. Can you imagine President Lincoln after the Battle of Gettysburg ordering General Ulysses Grant to withdraw his troops from the field of battle and stop pursuing the army of Robert Lee whose ultimate defeat, at astronomical cost of men and materiel on both sides, led to the end of the civil war? Obama is making a mockery of the great tradition of wise, intrepid American presidents. He was wrong in his prediction that the surge would fail, wrong in his assessment that Iraq is not presently the frontline of global terror and al Qaeda, and wrong in his strategy to pull out U.S. troops from a war that the latter are winning. On this score alone, he does not deserve to be the Commander-in-Chief of a Great Nation.

Over to you