It sounds like Barack Obama may have been thinking through the consequences of a troop withdrawal from Iraq after all.
At today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iraq, Obama raised a question that gets right to the heart of the debate that will play out in the presidential race – whether the United States could withdraw troops from Iraq without setting off a bloodbath even worse than the current violence.
Would it be possible to maintain the status quo, Obama asked – even a “messy, sloppy status quo” – with a force level as low as 30,000 troops?
“I can’t imagine the current status quo being sustainable with that kind of precipitous drawdown,” answered Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, who was testifying in his second hearing of the day with General David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.
“I’m not suggesting that we yank all our troops out all the way,” Obama responded. “I’m trying to get to an endpoint.” The problem, he complained, is that the administration has set the bar for success so high – no Iranian influence in Iraq, a democracy that includes all of the sectarian groups, and no al Qaeda presence – that its vision “portends the possibility of us staying for 20 or 30 years.”
But even by raising the question, Obama waded straight into the argument that his rivals, Republican John McCain and Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, had laid out in more black-and-white terms earlier in the day when Petraeus and Crocker testified before the Armed Services Committee.
The core of McCain’s argument, after all, was that Democrats who want to withdraw troops could set off a civil war and turn Iraq into a failed state, an easy haven for terrorists. If he and Obama face each other in the general election, you can bet McCain will raise this point repeatedly, and accuse Obama of being blind to the consequences.
Clinton, meanwhile, stuck relentlessly to the other side of the debate: the lack of political progress and the recent increase in violence in Iraq, despite the troop surge and all the lost lives. Every time the administration claims the situation is about to turn a corner, she said, “Iraqi leaders fail to deliver.”
The exchange in the Armed Services hearing suggests a scripted and predictable debate if it’s McCain vs. Clinton in the fall. That could be the case with McCain vs. Obama too. But for now, at least, Obama has provided a window into his thinking and a possible answer to the McCain argument. “When you have finite resources,” Obama said during the hearing, “you’ve got to define your goals tightly and modestly.”
If the voters agree, McCain will have to come up with a compelling answer in time for the fall presidential debates.
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Comments
Very perceptive -- I haven't heard Obama comment this specifically before on what a possible "end game" in Iraq might look like. Nice blog, by the way -- I look forward to more between now and November.
Posted by: David Elliot
| April 9, 2008 10:29 AM
Actually, it sounds more like Obama is trying once again to find the middle ground between two extremes (insert Clash lyrics here). Coming up with some more realistic objectives would be a good start. It may be too soon to say that there's an endpoint in sight, but adjusting both goals and resources makes sense.
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| April 9, 2008 1:56 PM
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Posted by: elsylee
| April 9, 2008 5:02 PM
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