Obama On Petraeus: Start Bringing Troops Home Right Now
Obama's statement on Petraeus is in, and this line leaps out at us:
“I can only support a policy that begins an immediate removal of our troops from Iraq’s civil war, and initiates a sustained drawdown of our military presence.”
Amid the debate over whether Obama and Hillary should be showing more leadership and pressuring Congress not to pass any Iraq measure without a firm withdrawal timetable, this statement is interesting. On the one hand, Obama will not support any Congressional measure on Iraq that doesn't immediately start withdrawal. But on the other, he's not saying one way or the other -- as has Dodd -- whether he'd be willing to support a measure not containing a date-certain for completion of that withdrawal. That's arguably the key question.
Hillary, meanwhile, has called on Congress to stick to a date-certain approach but has stopped short of saying that she wouldn't vote for anything not containing a firm withdrawal timetable. Obama's full statement after the jump.
Obama's full statement:
“Changing the definition of success to stay the course with the wrong policy is the wrong course for our troops and our national security. The time to end the surge and to start bringing our troops home is now – not six months from now. The Iraqi government is not achieving the political progress that was the stated purpose of the surge, and in key areas has gone backwards. Our military cannot sustain its current deployments without crippling our ability to respond to contingencies around the world. It’s time for a change of direction that brings our troops home, applies real pressure on the Iraqis to act, surges our diplomacy, and addresses Iraq’s urgent humanitarian crisis. I can only support a policy that begins an immediate removal of our troops from Iraq’s civil war, and initiates a sustained drawdown of our military presence.”
Comments (4)
Daniel wrote on September 10, 2007 3:20 PM:Democrats are really making Iraq a huge issue this past week and it was time for Obama to take a stance because he was being pounced by many for not taking a lead on this. Remains doubtful this will satisfy his critics.
Greg wrote on September 10, 2007 3:28 PM:yeah, it looks to me that he is sidestepping the central question here -- either you're prepared to rule out supporting something without a date certain, or you're not...
NCSteve wrote on September 10, 2007 3:37 PM:The problem that all of the candidates face is that you can't give a date certain that would be both guarenteed to be achievable and satisfactory to the people here who think we have some sort of Star Trek teleporter we can use to beam the troops and their gear home overnight. Getting out of this thing is going to be a logistic and strategic nightmare.
Contrary to popular conception, we do not have the air-lift capbility to just load everybody and everything onto planes and leave over the course of a a week or two. Instead, its all got to get to a port somewhere so we can put it onto ships and it will take several round trips to get it done. As best I can tell, this means that their either going to have to go overland through Kurdistan and then through Turkey, through Basra or through Kuwait.
None of those are very good choices. "Bye Kurds, hope everything works out for you" or "bye Kuwaitis. Thanks for letting us use your country to launch our spectacularly unpopular failed invasion of your neighbor to the north." Or "excuse me Muqutada, but if you could ask you nominal supporters to refrain from shooting at us for a bit, we'll be out of your hair in no time."
We've got got the majority of our land forces and their equipment there. Unlike Vietnam, We do not have the option of leaving the gear behind for our "allies" to use. All of it is too expensive to replace, and a lot of it is too sophisticated and classified to leave around so that the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians and God knows who else can get their hands on pieces of it. We don't even make tanks anymore. We just keep repairing and refurbing the M-1. Even if we weren't afraid of the most powerful tank in the world falling into the wrong hands, We still couldn't leave any of them behind because they are not replaceable. Ditto every Bradley, every up-armored Humvee, every Striker and LAV, every helicopter and on and on and on.
Add to that the fact that putting an entire army on the road for a retreat all at once is, in military terms, a Very Bad Idea. Historically, doing this, has an unfortunate tendency to turn the retreating army into a gigantic target of opportunity. There are tens of thousands of Iraqis buried beside the "Highway of Death" from the Persian Gulf War (the first one, the one that wasn't a humuliating failure) who would testify to that if not for the fact that they're dead.
So, basically, we have to find a way to get out fast enough to motivate all the guys waiting around to get their civil war started to wait some more and wave goodbye, but not so quickly that it turns our retreating force into a great big fat target.
Hence Hillary's kerfluffle with DoD over the summer over whether we've done the planning for withdrawal and her coyness on dates certain. Hence Obama's evasation of talking about dates certain. And hence my complete lack of patience for Richardson's apparent plan to issue everyone Over There a pair of ruby slippers, have them click their heels three times and chant "there's no place like home."
This is not going to be pretty, it is not going to be fast and it could very easily end up being very, very bloody.
Um, just to clarify, by "people here," I meant here in the U.S., not here at TPM Election Central.
And, yeah, I do miss that "edit" feature that let commenters fix their spelling and grammer errors after the fact even more than I miss the nested comments and the sometimes abused but still somewhat useful reputation scoring.
