Fall in Iraq

President Obama announced that U.S. troops will be removed from Iraq by the end of 2011. I know I should feel relief but the feeling is not that simple. I am angry and sad and scared about the aftermath.I feel almost as if leaving Iraq now is a tacit acknowledgement that the U.S. should not have been there in the first place. And if going to Iraq was a mistake, what do we say to the men and women who went to Iraq to serve their country?   KML

Michael Schmidt and Eric Schmitt, writing for the New York Times,  provide some evidence  the precipitious escape from Iraq is indeed part of a desperate political strategy to get President Obama re- elected in November 2012.  The announcement of bringing home the troops from Iraq by Christmas is an appealing way to sway the electorate and neatly ignores the obvious question: was there a legitimate reason for the US military to be in Iraq in the first place? Writing from Baghdad they state: “As the United States prepares to withdraw its troops from Iraq by year’s end, senior American and Iraqi officials are expressing growing concern that Al-Qaeda’s offshoot here, which just a few years ago waged a debilitating insurgency that plunged the country into a civil war, is poised for a deadly resurgence.” It seems that of late there has been a “significant increase in the number of Iraqi-born suicide bombers. ”   They add that Major General Jeffrey Buchanan, the American military’s top spokesman in Iraq, stated “I cringe whenever anybody makes a pronouncement that  Al Qaeda is on its last legs.”

If GW’s reactive decision to re-invade Iraq was a mistake, based on personal motives we may never understand, then such an error in judgment is being compounded by President Obama’s politically motivated reaction. The cost of these misadventures by our political leaders have been payed by the blood, the concussive traumatic brain injuries  and the lives of our voluntary armed forces. And this does not speak to the profoundly disrupted lives of those soldiers of all services who survived but  will never be the same.  Who is speaking for them?  On a daily basis I thank 15 to 20 soldiers for their service and often express my sorrow for the loss their buddies. But now, to borrow from Robert Frost, they are not able to appreciate their service; now they are unable to look back with pride and forward with hope.

An unfortunate follow-up to the above political manipulations is the report, also from the New York Times, by  Thom Shanker and Elisabeth Bemiller, who reported on 7 November 2011 that Leon Panetta, “a former White House budget chief, acknowledged in an interview that he faced deep political pressures as he weighed cuts to Pentagon spending, which has doubled to $700 billion a year since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.”  The article details the various programs that will be cut, bases closed, and so forth, including the increase anticipated  in health care insurance premiums to military retirees and families.  The cost that has been paid by our military volunteers has not been addressed at all in the budgetary formulation. I guess the cost in lives is not politically expedient.  Perhaps we should speak for the silent Soldiers, Marines Seaman and Airmen.