A different perspective on Iraq

Much of the dialogue about the Iraq War centers on the past. Politicians love to reformat the arguments to favor their past actions.

Did Iraq have WMDs? Was it wise to invade Iraq? Was al Qaida in Iraq before the invasion? Was it wise to support the “surge”?

Obama repeatedly states that he did not support the Iraq invasion and John McCain did, and John McCain repeatedly states that he supported the “surge” and Barrack Obama did not.

The facts are that of a total of 100 Senators, 48 Republicans and 29 Democrats supported the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. 1 Republican, 21 Democrats, and 1 Independent voted against. You may be as surprised as I was to learn that Barrack Obama had no part in this vote because he was not elected to the Senate until November 2004. He did come out in opposition to the war as early as October 2, 2002, when he gave a speech against the war at an anti-war rally in Chicago. However, since he was not a U.S. Senator at the time, he did not face the high-stakes choice which confronted fellow Democratic Presidential Primary candidates Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, Chris Dodd, and former Senator John Edwards, who all voted in October 2002 to give President Bush power to wage war in Iraq. In fact, Obama is quoted the day before the 2004 Democratic National Committee convention as saying: "On Iraq, on paper, there's not as much difference, I think, between the Bush administration and a John Kerry administration as there would have been a year ago. There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute."

In any case, selection of the next president should really center on the present and future and the decisions the next president will probably be confronted with during his term in office.

McCain’s views were stated clearly in a March 31, 2007 interview by CNN's Wolf Blitzer while the Senator was in Iraq. McCain said, "Failure is catastrophe. Failure is genocide. Failure means we come back. Failure means they follow us home."

One day later, in a telephone interview with Sen. Obama who was in the U.S., Blitzer asked Obama "What if he's right? What if he's right, and what you're proposing and a lot of Democrats are proposing results in genocide in Iraq?", to which Obama responded:

"Well, look, what you have right now is chaos in Iraq. After having spent hundreds of billions of dollars, after seeing close to 3,200 lives lost, what you now see is chaos. And there's no end in sight."

But today we know there is not chaos and there is an end in sight although there is also no question that al Qaida, though severely weakened, is present in Iraq.

So the question remains, what happens if we withdraw prematurely? Some compare withdrawal from Iraq with withdrawal from Vietnam but this is a flawed comparison. The Vietcong did not follow us across the ocean. Al Qaida on the other hand, already paid us two visits and if we allow them to acquire a comfortable base in Iraq, we can be sure that more visits will follow. At this stage of the war on terror, would it not be a tragedy for the U.S., after so many lives have been lost in Iraq, for the next President to conclude that he would need to remove the next Iraqi regime?