There has already been plenty of commentary about the recent withdrawal of the last US combat troops from Iraq, along with additional comment about the media's predictable reaction - i.e., trying to credit Republicans for the ending of their own historic atrocity by a Democratic administration. But my point is not to talk about news media doublethink - we are all well aware of it, and I've never seen the point of being perpetually shocked at problems long recognized and understood. What I would like to do, instead, is thank President Obama for ending the Iraq War.
The administration had no mandate from Congress to do so: There were no credible threats of funding being cut off; no resolutions passed stating that this must occur; no investigations into the Iraq War making its continuation politically toxic. In other words, there was nothing essentially political in the decision to end the war other than the exact same reasons that it was indefensible in the first place: It added nothing to US national security, and yet grievously damaged it at enormous expense.
No President - indeed, no American - remotely justified in calling themselves such would have failed to end it, and yet we know (almost beyond the shadow of a doubt) that no Republican with any chance of ever sitting in the Oval Office would have done so. They were not merely insistent on continuing the war without limit or purpose, but were chomping at the bit to use Iraq as a staging ground to murderously invade yet another country that had not attacked us, Iran. And this wasn't even a conjecture based on the psychotic character of Republican leadership, but an openly-expressed desire on their part. Millions of innocent lives were, to their perspective, little more than toys waiting to be swept off a tabletop, and they were already busily formulating their excuses like the farce that preceded the Iraq invasion.
But that didn't happen. Far from expanding the general cataclysm that was the Iraq war into Iran as Republicans wanted, we have shut down the former and are diplomatically engaged with the latter to a degree unprecedented since before the 1979 Revolution. Would another Democratic administration have done this, or would they have - true to form - been ruled by fear of being labeled "soft on defense," and allowed an "eventual" withdrawal to be dragged out in perpetuity? The latter seems overwhelmingly likely, so I think it is clear at this point that we have that extremely rare species of creature in the White House - a results-oriented President.
He was against the Iraq war from the beginning, as was I, and now he has ended it 19 months into his first term: An interval in which a McCain/Palin administration could have already extended the war into a general regional conflict with ten times the body count. "Thank you, President Obama" is almost laughably inadequate, and I am sure that it will generate just as great an intensity of resentment as all recognition of this administration invokes. But like the robotic, Republican sycophant doubletalk of the media, I am not interested in the four-hour-long Two Minute Hate rants of people who've made this President their personal Goldstein, right or left. So thank you, President Obama: You have ended a war when no one was looking, almost like an afterthought to what was already a steady drumbeat of major accomplishments.
Ideally, I would now like to see war crimes investigations (by the US Justice Department) pursued against the conspirators responsible for the Iraq War, but I am a patient and rational man, and unlike some I don't demand miracles on a more frequent schedule than a magazine subscription. Still, I am optimistic: Regardless of our instinct to compare Iraq to Vietnam, and thereby insist that like Kissinger et al the Bush/Cheney axis will never be brought to justice, the analogies are exceedingly tenuous - the Iraq War was far, far beyond Vietnam in the forethought of its plotting and blatant criminality of execution, and there is essentially no real cover for the perpetrators other than the failure to pursue them: Something that only needs to change once, in a single case, for the illusion of immunity to disappear entirely.
Nevertheless, my praise does not depend on anything in particular following from this achievement: The future is ours to choose, and the first step to doing so is divesting ourselves of unhelpful burdens immorally and irrationally imposed on us by the past. President Obama, as usual, makes difficult achievements based on careful policy look like the spontaneous products of gravity, and I can only assume he has learned to have a sense of humor about the sort of people who deny him credit on that basis.