Another National Security Speech

I have been actually consumed with other affairs and didn't see The Speech last night. So I'm just going to take Spencer Ackerman's critical assessment of the speech. He notes:

“I’m mindful that the Iraq war has been a contentious issue at home. Here, too, it’s time to turn the page.” Actually, he already has. From 2002 to 2008, the Iraq war was perhaps the most politically contentious issue in American public life. In February 2009, starting with the Camp LeJeune speech — pfft. It’s done. And it’s an unheralded political success. You read the Wolfowitz and Bolton op-eds today? Neither of them can really bite the bullet and say that we should remain in Iraq, waging a war, and so they strain to find an actual critique of Obama’s approach. They’re like the sort of arguments “against” the war that Tom Daschle or Dick Gephardt used to make — signaling they hate the president, fearful of getting on the wrong side of an issue.

If Obama hadn’t embraced Petraeus and Odierno, and let them basically spend 2009 without meaningful troop withdrawals, that might not have happened, and we might have been arguing about Iraq for the past 18 months — which is to say for the past eight uninterrupted years. 

I get the feeling that President Obama wants to draw down Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible without getting smeared with the "dirty Democrats lost the war again" label. It may be a difficult task, but I don't think that the Vietnam splash is going to work this time. That doesn't mean that the Republicans won't try as hard as they could to use 1970s generalizations to tar this president. Let's see if the American public is smarter than that.

I saw a twitter by Dr. Steve Metz in response to some neocon nonsensical statement: "Everyone agrees that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. That doesn't mean that the invasion made strategic sense."

UPDATE: I like the Bobblespeak Translations' version better than the original.

Comments

[matt]

Metz is spot on. The world would be better off without Kim Jong-il, Hu Jintao and the CCP, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, and a host of other dictators and crackpots. That doesn't mean, however, that it's an easy or appropriate task to dismantle their regimes from the outside and have a foreign power restructure their systems of governance. Why this still needs to be repeated escapes me.