from Iraq War Regrets in The National Review, a compendium of analysis.
Victor Davis Hanson
Despite the postwar errors of occupation (among them most prominently the dismissal of the Iraqi army and the failure to use sufficient force to ensure order) that had led to a huge loss of American blood and treasure, Barack Obama entered office with a mostly quiet Iraq (not a single American death in December 2009) thanks to the successful surge. Vice President Joe Biden appreciated that fact, and immediately took credit for the prior work of the U.S. military, declaring that Iraq likely would become the administration’s “greatest achievement” — a prognosis later echoed by Obama himself when he declared Iraq stable and secure after pulling out all U.S. troops. For all the slander of “no blood for oil,” Iraq’s oil industry for the first time was conducted in transparent fashion, the big winners being Russia and China, and not the supposedly oil-obsessed U.S. (Note how the mindless popular criticism went from a supposedly diabolical oil-hungry U.S. to a naive U.S. that allowed others to reap the fruits of its sacrifice.)
In 2004 Barack Obama, in pre-presidential-candidate mode, had expressed no major differences with Bush-administration policy pertaining to Iraq. A residual force of a few thousand American army and air-force personnel could have institutionalized our costly achievement and kept the Maliki government honest while controlling the skies over Iraq, preventing something like the Islamic State or the intrusion of Iranian influence. Instead, a 2012 reelection talking point of getting every soldier out of Iraq (in a way inconsistent with prior postwar U.S. policy of monitoring hard-won successes with peacekeepers, as in the Balkans, Korea, Germany, Italy, and Japan) trumped security concerns. (It should be also noted that candidate Obama had declared the surge a failure and advocated pulling out U.S. troops as early as March 2008.)
Had we pulled all U.S. troops out of South Korea by 1955 — a war every bit as unpopular as Iraq by 1953 and which had done to a lame-duck Harry Truman’s popularity what Iraq did to George W. Bush’s — we would have ensured that prior military successes were rendered null and void. A weak, authoritarian Seoul government would either have imploded or been overrun by North Korea. Without U.S. peacekeepers, there would be no South Korean miracle today, but only the horror of North Korea spread throughout the entire peninsula.
We have forgotten all this. Instead in smug fashion we now dismiss a complex war with a banal pejorative or two, assured that 51 percent of the public for the moment agrees and therefore further reflection is unnecessary.
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