Obama: Mission Accomplished Again

Ninety months, 4,500 deaths and 35,000 wounded (among the American forces) later, Barack Obama could revive his predecessor’s unfortunate slogan from the bridge of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln: “Mission Accomplished.” Even though 50,000 soldiers remain on Iraqi soil, they will no longer be on the front line. They’re there to train the Iraqis, and by the end of 2011, all of them will be back in the United States. The book will be closed on a war whose direct cost will be $750 billion. Obama is closing the book on a war for which he did not vote as a junior senator. Nor did he vote in favor of sending the extra troops requested by General David Petraeus, whom he just named head of operations in Afghanistan.

Obama is right not to proclaim victory. Seven years of war did not end — as the neoconservatives who pushed for the invasion of Iraq claimed it would — with democracy established in Iraq and then spreading throughout the Middle East. Read my lips.

In 2006, the daily death toll averaged about 300. This year, it was down to 10, but for the past few weeks, since the withdrawal was announced, the death count has gone up to 400 in July, the highest in three years. There are no scenes reminiscent of the ballet of helicopters on the roof of the American Embassy during the fall of Saigon in 1975. But in the final hours of the war, the United States is very far from leaving a stable country where democratic institutions have been reestablished.

What will happen now? It’s hard to say. [Lieutenant] General Babakar Zebari, the Iraqi army’s chief of staff, has said that the army will not be capable of keeping the country secure until 2020. Not very heartening.

But the 44th president knows that the American people, who see no end in sight to their economic woes, are weary of these two wars. They have siphoned off money that could have been used to get the country back on its feet. The government spent more on the war in Iraq than it did on the investment program known as TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), which injected government funds into public works projects all over the country. Above all, the money was spent on a war undertaken for the wrong reasons. America paid dearly for it.

The United States will now concentrate wholly on the war in Afghanistan, hoping meanwhile that Iraq doesn’t fall head first into chaos or end up in the hands of another tyrant. The Taliban is stronger and more aggressive than ever. Obama has set the withdrawal of the armed forces to begin next July. That goal seems quite utopian.

America is also weary of the Afghan war. No one even imagines that it could end in a peaceful victory and the building of a stable country. If the Americans stay, they, like so many others before them, will never get out of the quagmire in Afghanistan. If they go, they will leave a clear field for the Taliban, who will send home 2 million girls who currently have access to education. They will also leave the field clear for al-Qaida, whose most important leaders, Sheik Omar and Osama bin Laden, are still on the loose.

The point of Obama’s televised speech this evening served only to remind the American people that he kept his promise to bring the troops home, and therefore deserves the voters’ trust at a time when more and more people are having doubts about him. It’s not certain they’ll listen.