Obama Inherits Bush Victory

My military historian friend sent me the following op-ed piece from what he refers to as the “New York Times-Jazira”. He also criticizes the last paragraph which appears to be an attempt to get the Democrats to take credit for the end of the Iraq war.

George W. Bush and his administration accepted the harsh reality that the Iraqis decided there would be a timetable for withdrawal. It is, after all, their country. It is the Bush administration that negotiated the end of American participation in Iraq’s long-term struggle with itself and with the extremists inside its borders. The Democrats cannot claim this victory; that legacy belongs to Mr. Bush.

By the way, President-elect Obama may be selecting his new advisors, but he’s spending way too much time posing for coffee mugs, hats, t-shirts, dinner plates, balloons, coins and other collectibles. For crying out loud, the guy hasn’t even done anything yet.

He and his supporters are probably checking to see if there’s enough room in the Lincoln Memorial for another statue…

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November 30, 2008

Obama's Iraq Inheritance

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Op-Ed Columnist

Here's a story you don't see very often. Iraq's highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.

That's not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals, both Kurdish and Arab, defending Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and a lot of press freedom. I can't imagine any other Arab country today where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel - and intellectuals would openly defend him in the press.

In the case of Iraq, though, the federal high court, in a unanimous decision, vacated the Parliament's rescinding of Alusi's immunity, with the decision delivered personally by Chief Justice Medhat al-Mahmoud. The decision explained that although a 1950s-era law made traveling to Israel a crime punishable by death, Iraq's new Constitution establishes freedom to travel. Therefore the Parliament's move was "illegal and unconstitutional because the current Constitution does not prevent citizens from traveling to any country in the world," Abdul-Sattar Bayrkdar, spokesman for the court, told The Associated Press. The judgment even made the Parliament speaker responsible for the expenses of the court and the defense counsel!

I don't think it's reasonable to expect Iraq to have relations with Israel anytime soon, but the fact that it may be developing an independent judiciary is good news. It's a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries. And it's a reminder that a decent outcome may still be possible in Iraq, especially now that the Parliament has endorsed the U.S.-Iraqi plan for a 2011 withdrawal of American troops.

Al Qaeda has not been fully defeated in Iraq; suicide bombings are still an almost daily reality. But it has been dealt a severe blow, which I believe is one reason the Muslim jihadists - those brave warriors who specialize in killing women and children and defenseless tourists – have turned their attention to softer targets like India. Just as they tried to stoke a Shiite-Sunni civil war in Iraq, and failed, they are now trying to stoke a Hindu-Muslim civil war in India.

If Iraq can keep improving - still uncertain - and become a place where Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites can write their own social contract and live together with a modicum of stability, it could one day become a strategic asset for the United States in the post-9/11 effort to promote different politics in the Arab-Muslim world.

How so? Iraq is a geopolitical space that for the last three decades of the 20th century was dominated by a Baathist dictatorship, which, though it provided a bulwark against Iranian expansion, did so at the cost of a regime that murdered tens of thousands of its own people and attacked three of its neighbors.

In 2003, the United States, under President Bush, invaded Iraq to change the regime. Terrible postwar execution and unrelenting attempts by Al Qaeda to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war turned the Iraqi geopolitical space into a different problem - a maelstrom of violence for four years, with U.S. troops caught in the middle. A huge price was paid by Iraqis and Americans. This was the Iraq that Barack Obama ran against.

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from moderate Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda and Iraqi Shiites against pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability. There is now, for the first time, a chance - still only a chance - that a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops - because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty - but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

I'm sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did - that he'll wait forever for them to sort out their politics - while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party's national security credentials than that.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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President Bush may not have done everything right, but the people of Iraq and Afghanistan are free and he can rightfully be proud of that.

Charles M. Grist
www.TheCobraTeam.com
www.AmericanRanger.blogspot.com