Obama's Iraq Address: Afghan War Looms Large Over Speech
By MICHAEL CROWLEY – 1 hr 48 mins ago
When he speaks from the Oval Office on Tuesday night, Barack Obama will deliver one of the hardest addresses of his presidency. Yes, he's had tough ones before - on Afghanistan, health care and the BP oil spill. But Tuesday's speech marking the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq confronts Obama with a subject that defies easy explanation, a policy that allows little self-congratulation and a political climate in which Iraq's place is not clear.
There are three reasons for that lack of clarity. The first is that Iraq itself is in an inconclusive place. The Obama Administration had hoped that by now a third democratically elected government would be functioning in Baghdad, but five months after national elections in March, a political stalemate drags on (raising concerns over a possible call for new elections). Iraq may yet emerge as a relatively American-friendly exemplar of Middle East democracy. But it's still possible that more chaos and civil war - perhaps leading to something far more sinister - lie around the corner. Obama simply can't claim closure. (Watch TIME's video "Iraq's Parliament Elections: Fragile Democracy.")
The President's second problem is how little he can claim to have accomplished in Iraq. He is certainly entitled to brag about meeting his 2008 campaign promise to withdraw U.S. combat troops. (Obama will leave behind a smaller ***** of about 50,000 troops - ostensibly trainers but in practice soldiers who will likely also perform some combat duties - until the end of next year.) But when Obama first made that promise, in 2007, the country was gripped by ****** civil war–like conditions and the American mission there still looked like an overall failure. Walking away under those circumstances would have involved huge moral and political costs, ones that Obama said he was willing to bear in the name of the national interest. Today, however, Iraq is relatively peaceful and its steep decline in ******** has fended off the taint of defeat and retreat. What's more, the current U.S. withdrawals are broadly in line with an agreement reached between the Iraqi government and the Bush Administration. Obama is fulfilling a promise that was bold when he made it, but far less so now...
