George Packer Wants to Turn Barack Obama to the Dark Side in Iraq
In a July 7, 2008, New Yorker article, George Packer nudges Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama to the dark side by adopting a scary, recycled foreign policy that buys into the neo-conservative view that American soldiers should continue to fight a losing/no-win war in Iraq for several more years and to milk the American tax payers of billions of dollars.
In the article, he writes: There will be no such thing as victory in Iraq, but the next president, if he remains nimble, may be able to keep the damage under control . . . One can imagine him speaking more honestly on Iraq. If pressed on his timetable for withdrawal, he could say, ‘That was always a goal, not a blueprint. When circumstances change, I don’t close my eyes—I adapt.’
Since when has Iraq been “under control”? Oh yeah, the so-called illusion of the “surge,” which has provided a temporary respite from the chaos. How exactly should Obama “adapt”? Excuse me, George, but Obama has explicitly stated from the very beginning that he endorses—and plans on executing—a phased withdrawal from an unjust war and that he will redirect his efforts to the real war on terror from the Middle East to Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.
How long must this charade continue before talking heads such as George Packer realize that the United States of America has been a laughingstock on the world stage during the last seven years because of George W. Bush’s and John McCain’s misconceived, ill-implemented, and wishful-thinking Iraq policy?
Wake up America~!!
Packer’s justification sounds eerily similar to Lyndon B. Johnson’s reasoning for continuing an American presence in Vietnam during which we lost more than 55,000 lives and of which turned out to be a glorified pissing contest (i.e., the “Domino Effect”) between the Soviet Union and the United States.
How many more American lives must be sacrificed to the blood-lust desires of the elite? How many Iraqi civilians must die in order for Americans to wake up to the fact that Iraq is a foreign policy black hole that will suck all of our country’s energy, time, money, and resources indefinitely if we don’t stop it—immediately.
Recently, President George W. Bush has capitulated when he and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki agreed to set a “time horizon” for reducing U.S. forces in Iraq. Even al-Maliki has voiced his support for Barack’s plan for a phased withdrawal in an e-mail, mistakenly released by the Bush Administration.
The time has come for the United States and its citizens to question – and to stand up to – armchair foreign policy analysts like George Packer, and to support Barack Obama’s original phased withdrawal plan without interruption and without reservation.
