Pres. Obama should highlight his Iraq withdrawal in every speech. He owns it. [View All]

There is NO way ANY republican president would have let go of their Iraq prize during their term in office. The occupation represented the totality of their response to the 9-11 plane crashes. It was the 'center' of their response to 'terror'. It was the manifestation of their bleating about 'democracy' and 'freedom'.

The only reason Bush forged an 'agreement' with Iraqis at the end of his term was an attempt to make it look like he was leaving while exploiting the loopholes in SOFA (still in there) which would have allowed him to claim that Iraq wasn't ready to stand on their own and linger longer. Hell, McCain/Palin would have our troops stay and nation-build for 100 years. There's no way they would leave themselves without a country to exploit for their defense industry benefactors.

There's no way a republican administration would have abandoned the self-perpetuating political foil in Iraq they created out of Bush's whole cloth like this Democratic president has. Just one of the dozens of bombings, or just one of the dozens of hiccups in the political fabric of their enabled Iraqi regime that have occurred in the past year would have erased any hope of a republican president abandoning their pet occupation.

This Democratic president has stood fast to his withdrawal plan in the face of 'setbacks' and disruptive violence in Iraq, and he and VP Biden deserve a great deal of credit for that steadfastness. Every assertion by this administration that Iraqis can handle their own affairs without our military occupying their country indefinitely is a repudiation of Bush's self-perpetuating farce. Every troop reduction in Iraq is a repudiation of republican nonsense about 'defending freedom' and 'spreading democracy' there (if anyone forgot the rhetoric that kept our troops bogged down in Iraq).

This president can see as well as anyone that there has been little (or nothing) accomplished by our military worth the sacrifices in Iraq that will endure long past our leaving. The determined exit in the face of continued turmoil there is proof enough that Pres. Obama is no fan of opportunistic nation-building behind the force of our military.

The follow-through in fulfilling his promises in Iraq give hope that our new president is not going to be willing to invest his political capital in perpetually defending the unpopular military campaign in Afghanistan at the expense of a focus on his domestic priorities and ambitions at home.

I'm not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or, in some way, you know, sending a message that America is here for the duration," Pres. Obama said in 2009.

“The burdens of a young century cannot fall on American shoulders alone,” Mr. Obama wrote in the introduction of the national security strategy released in May of this year. “Indeed, our adversaries would like to see America sap our strength by overextending our power.”

That's the promise this Democratic president offers those of us who wish these occupations were over yesterday; a hope that he's not so enamored of warring that he won't stick to his promise to draw down his escalated troop deployment in Afghanistan. The mixed results of the Afghan elections and the almost negligible effect on the balance of power outside of Kabul (a majority adhering to the tribal leadership of the Taliban and others over the influence and control of Afghanistan's central government) have already exposed the administration's nation-building attempts behind the force of our military as the crap-shoot almost everyone expected it to be.

We can leave Afghanistan much the same way we're leaving Iraq . . . with our Democratic president leading our troops home. This promise kept in Iraq in the face of the country's ongoing turmoil and political uncertainty makes that commitment to eventually exit a more believable prospect.