An irresponsible exit from Iraq

Michael Gordon reports in the New York Times that despite the insistence by Obama supporters that he responsibly ended the mission in Iraq and their touting of our Iraq withdrawal as a foreign policy success for Obama, in fact, President Obama fumbled away the Iraq mission at a critical turning point.

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler also calls out President Obama's attempt to spin his egregious failure with Iraq as an intentional foreign policy success.

We forget now that the 'shock and awe' war to oust Saddam's regime was a resounding success. The high cost cited by anti-Iraq critics has mostly occurred in the post-war occupation, ie, the security and stabilization, nation-building, and transition phases.

With the Petraeus-led COIN 'surge', we paid dearly for a second chance but we successfully won another opportunity to secure our gains, win the post-war, and build the peace on our terms in Iraq. President Bush handed President Obama a hard-won turnaround success in strategically critical Iraq to build upon. Iraq could have been headed the way of Germany, Japan, and South Korea with our partnership, except President Obama fumbled away the possibility.

As Walter Russell Mead notes, it's unseemly, even shameless, for the Obama campaign to tout our Iraq withdrawal as a foreign policy success when it is actually a failure with long-term consequences. Gordon's report of Obama's poor leadership with the Iraq mission contrasts sharply with Gordon's report of historic leadership by President Bush with the COIN 'surge'.

The history of Iraq after Saddam could have been very different. Based on what I've heard, there was a 'golden hour' in the immediate post-war in 2003 when our leverage and control in Iraq were at their maximum and the Iraqi people hoped for and expected us to deliver on our promises of liberal reform. However, the Coalition Provisional Authority, while intellectually capable, proved practically insufficient for the mission. The enemy seized the initiative and we lost the 'golden hour'. Michael Gordon reports that a faction of officers and diplomats pushed for a rudimentary COIN strategy years before the COIN 'surge', but were rejected in favor of giving more time to the civilian-led Coalition Provisional Authority. In other words, counterinsurgency was the emergency back-up plan for Iraq when it should have been the starting strategy for the post-war occupation. President Bush eventually approved the COIN 'surge' over strong opposition to COIN within the military and even his administration. We can only speculate the difference counterinsurgency could have made in Iraq had it been implemented from the outset of the post-war. I fear we will also speculate in the future whether we left Iraq too early to cement a constructive course for our charge.

Eric