On the eve of Barack Obama's historic trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe, I offer the following brief summary of the politics of the Iraq War.
The Iraq War, most now conclude, was an unnecessary war, one based on either faulty intelligence or deliberate dishonesty on the part of the president and vice president. It is, in short, a war that should never have been authorized and never waged. John McCain joined with a majority of his Senate colleagues in authorizing the war and to this day supports the war and its goals, though he began to criticize the conduct of the war some months into it. Barack Obama was not in the Senate at the time of the vote authorizing the war, but made his opposition to the war known in a speech he gave in 2002. He has been consistent in opposing the war.
Last year, after much unhappiness with the conduct of the war and the increasing number of U.S. casualties, the president decided to send in more troops in what became known as "the surge." Since that time, U.S. deaths are down, and there seems to be more stability in the country. Many foreign policy experts attribute this not to the surge but to the United States paying tribal leaders not to attack U.S. troops and to go after al Qaeda in Iraq and to the decision of Moktada al Sadr to order his army to stand down for now. John McCain supported the surge from the beginning. Barack Obama opposed it as he wanted the troops to leave.
Given their differences, each candidate wants to stress a different thing, and each wants their focus to determine the election. McCain wants everyone to forget that we got into the war on the basis of lies and that we attacked a country that had not attacked us. His campaign consistently says it doesn't matter how we got into the war, all that matters is that we stay until some as yet undefined definition of victory. As much as he wants people to forget how we got into the war, he wants everyone to remember that he supported the surge, which he claims is working. However, it apparently isn't working well enough to bring troops home.
Barack Obama says something different. To Obama it matters a great deal how we got into this war, as he wants to change our entire foreign policy so that this kind of disaster never happens again. He wants to be careful getting out, especially as we were so careless getting in, but nevertheless he wants us to get out. He wants the Iraqis to step up and be responsible for their own country. He wants the troops home with their families. And he wants to stop borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from the Chinese just so that we can occupy Iraq, build permanent bases and allow companies like Halliburton to make a fortune there.
McCain says "Vote for me because I know war and know how to wage it, even if we are at war in a country that we probably invaded for ideological rather than defensive reasons. Vote for me because I'm one tough son of a gun."
Obama says "Vote for me because had I been president we would never have gone to Iraq and when I am president I will not take the nation to war unless it is absolutely necessary. Vote for me because of my good judgment and my ability to find solutions other than war. Vote for me because if I take the nation to war, it will be for legitimate reasons."
For those Americans who see the War in Iraq as the primary issue in this election, those are the choices - a candidate who brags about toughness and demands victory in a war that never should have been waged, or a candidate who could see through the administration's bogus case for war, and opposed it when very few politicians would take that chance.
