Saturday, October 29, 2011

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

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Tecumseh said...

Visions of things to come:

America will pay a high price for defeat in Iraq. Our global credibility is seriously damaged—it is surely no accident that the weekend after President Obama announced that we were abandoning Iraq, President Hamid Karzai said that Afghanistan would stand with Pakistan against a U.S. attack. Why not? The Iranian and Pakistani narratives all along have been that the Americans will ultimately abandon their allies to their fate, while the neighbors will be around to exact revenge. President Obama has just reinforced that narrative before all the world.

The United States will also pay a high moral price for this retreat. Tens of thousands of Iraqis sacrificed and put themselves and their families in enormous danger relying on the backing of the United States against our mutual enemies—al Qaeda and Iranian militias. The Maliki government, perhaps partially at the behest of the Quds Force, is now beginning to eliminate some of those people, and the trickle of blood and refugees will likely become a river. Yet another group of brave people who share America’s core values and risked their lives to fight with us will conclude bitterly that Americans can never be trusted.
[..]
Now that President Obama has perfected so many of the analogies between Vietnam and Iraq, we may well come to wish that Iraq, like Vietnam, were ultimately a sideshow. But Iraq is much more vital to our national security than Vietnam ever was. The United States will have to bear the burden of this defeat and its disastrous consequences for a long time to come.

10/29/2011 8:45 PM

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