In a column largely, and justly, devoted to pointing out that President Obama’s excellent Libyan adventure, like his predecessor’s Iraqi incursion, was based on false pretences and has resulted more in chaos than democracy, Georgie F then launches as remarkable a series of non sequitur, false assumption, and disingenuous innuendo as I’ve seen since, well, since the last George F. Will column:
“Obama is conducting the foreign policy retreat that he promised, that then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton facilitated without apparent qualms and that many Americans said they wanted until it began to make them queasy. The Republican challenge is to articulate a policy that fills the vast space between this retreat and the ruinous grandiosity of the “freedom agenda” of Obama’s predecessor.”
Sorry, George, but I don’t recall Obama promising a retreat, unless you mean his promise to end the war in Iraq, which you yourself denounced as “ruinous grandiosity”—unless, of course, you’re now in favor of the War in Iraq, which, a very few paragraphs earlier, you said you weren’t. Furthermore, it wasn’t hard for Obama to promise to end the war in Iraq, since George Bush had already signed an agreement committing the U.S. to remove all its troops in 2011.
If I were a Republican propagandist, I would have no problem dissing Obama for “leaving” (or, more likely, “cutting and running”), since Obama happily took credit for ending the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq even though he had no choice in the matter and had, in fact, struggled manfully to negotiate a new agreement that would allow an extension of the U.S. commitment, failing to overcome the simple fact that, as then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, “most Iraqis wanted us out.” Remarkably enough, it was really the Iraqis themselves who ended the War in Iraq.* But unless Mr. Will is a paid Republican functionary, one might expect a modicum of attention to these facts.
“Retreat” is not a word I would use to the Libyan incursion, which again put the U.S. in the position of overthrowing an existing government, with all the ill consequences that Mr. Will has noted. One might also remark that it was not “many” Americans who indicated a sympathy with President Obama’s foreign policy, since he was both elected and re-elected by a majority of voters. As for Americans feeling queasy, what’s making “many” them feel queasy is not instability in Ukraine or in Iraq, but the fact that the deceitful howls of the architects of “ruinous grandiosity” are being featured prominently and uncritically in the media.
It is curious, to my mind, that Mr. Will implies that the current instability in Iraq is due to the president’s “retreat,” since George has put himself on the record as saying that the invasion of that country was disastrous. Is he now faulting the president for taking our troops out of Iraq, something that he actually had to do, thanks to the agreement reached by President Bush? Excuse me, but where is this vast space, other than between Mr. Will’s ears?
*Strangely, they did not enjoy the presence of tens of thousands of trigger-happy foreign troops in their midst.
