"There is now, for the first time, a chance..."

"..,— still only a chance — that a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space."

Thomas Friedman:

If Iraq can keep improving — still uncertain — and become a place where Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites can write their own social contract and live together with a modicum of stability, it could one day become a strategic asset for the United States in the post-9/11 effort to promote different politics in the Arab-Muslim world.

How so? Iraq is a geopolitical space that for the last three decades of the 20th century was dominated by a Baathist dictatorship, which, though it provided a bulwark against Iranian expansion, did so at the cost of a regime that murdered tens of thousands of its own people and attacked three of its neighbors.

In 2003, the United States, under President Bush, invaded Iraq to change the regime. Terrible postwar execution and unrelenting attempts by Al Qaeda to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war turned the Iraqi geopolitical space into a different problem — a maelstrom of violence for four years, with U.S. troops caught in the middle. A huge price was paid by Iraqis and Americans. This was the Iraq that Barack Obama ran against.

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from moderate Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda and Iraqi Shiites against pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq. There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

I’m sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did — that he’ll wait forever for them to sort out their politics — while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party’s national security credentials than that.

Gotta love that eh... nothing would do more to enhance the Surrender Party's national security credentials.

Amazing. 

The guy who's promoted getting out of Iraq before victory could be claimed and while the terrorists there reigned can now, according to The New York Time's Thomas Friedman, take credit for what's taken place.

It's the new meme.

We should soon be seeing stories about how Gitmo is a good thing, the Bush tax cuts are a good thing, and the Patriot Act is a good thing.

Wait. And. See.

Comments

[Antimedia]

Well, yes, but they will be a good thing because Obama is doing them, not because Bush did them.

Don't you love how Bush has handed a peaceful Iraq to Obama on a silver platter and now the liberals are already positioning themselves to claim the victory as their own?

It's sort of the same way they claim to be the party of diversity when it was the Republicans who freed the slaves and it was the Republicans who passed civil rights legislation.