Monday, September 06, 2010

Obama's "Mission Accomplished" Moment

All American "combat troops" in Iraq have been withdrawn.

Yesterday, American troops fought a fierce gun battle in Baghdad to defend an Iraqi military headquarters.

The present administration has offered simplistic statements to placate its pacificist constituency, not much different from Bush's or McCain's calls for the pursuit of "victory," an elusive concept in a situation as complex as the Islamic Middle East. For the future, we can only hope and insist that actual policy not concede to political rhetoric by eviscerating the necessary and ongoing military support of Iraqi democracy, as a war-weary Congress did to Vietnam in the 1970s but wiser leaders did not do to Europe in the 1940s through 1980s or to Korea in the 1950s to the present.

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