Ralph Peters thinks that Obama's speech promising a pullout of all American combat troops from Iraq by the summer of 2010 is "all flash and no bang." Me too.
Peters writes:
Will the 50,000 troops he intends to leave in Iraq, the trainers and maintainers, be forbidden to defend themselves? Are they just going to hang out? If terrorists or the Iranians skunk us, are we just going to ask for more?
We're not going to leave 50,000 support troops in Iraq without combat units to protect them. We'll just ban the word "brigade" and call our shooters "task forces."
Why the rush to get out anyway? American troops are no longer dying in Iraq and they're doing much good preserving stability, training the Iraqis, and rebuilding the country. Perhaps the president simply wants to use them in Afghanistan (or, as is becoming increasingly likely, on the Mexican border), but, as Peters writes, he sounds like he's just trying to mollify the lefties who helped elect him because they understood that he was going to bring our troops home immediately.
Obama's dilemma is this: Iraq is all but won while Afghanistan had been won but is now beginning to slide back toward chaos. If either of those theaters in the war on Islamic terror goes sour there'll be no blaming Bush or the Republicans for the collapse. The American people will see the loss as Obama's fault. He certainly doesn't want that to happen, so his challenge is to appease the left-wing, some of whom would be delighted to see it happen, while doing what he can to preserve the gains made by the Bush administration. And he wants to do all this, presumably, while being careful not to give the Bush administration any credit for those gains.
It'll be interesting to watch how he navigates this tightrope. The trick will be to ignore what he says as he swings the watch back and forth in front of our eyes and soothingly tells us that we're getting sleeeepy. Instead, we need to focus on what he does. As with earmarks, the two could well be very different.
RLC