OBAMARAMA

Sen. Obama need not worry about being labeled a flip-flopper on the subject of the President’s Iraq war. He was opposed to the incursion from the beginning, when, as an Illinois state senator, he denounced the plan to invade Iraq as “a dumb war,” “a rash war,” and “the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” He rightly called it “a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”

And while the administration and much of the national media was highlighting the “imminent threat” Iraq posed to US security — pressuring the American people not to let “the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” — Sen. Obama had the conviction to say that while Saddam Hussein was “a brutal man…I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors…and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.”

Today, Sen. Obama has released a new statement reaffirming his position on the issue, sending an email (not yet available on his websites) titled “Escalation Is Not The Answer.” In it, he opposes the anticipated call from President Bush for tens of thousands more troops in Iraq, calling instead for a phased withdrawal without a specific timeline:

Now we are faced with a quagmire to which there are no good answers. But the one that makes very little sense is to put tens of thousands more young Americans in harm’s way without changing a strategy that has failed by almost every imaginable account.

[…]

It’s not clear that these troop levels are sustainable for a significant period of time, and according to our commanders on the ground, adding American forces will only relieve the Iraqis from doing more on their own. Moreover, without a coherent strategy or better cooperation from the Iraqis, we would only be putting more of our soldiers in the crossfire of a civil war.

There is no military solution to this war. Our troops can help suppress the violence, but they cannot solve its rootcauses. And all the troops in the world won’t be able to force Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to sit down at a table, resolve their differences, and forge a lasting peace. In fact, adding more troops will only push this political settlement further and further into the future, as it tells the Iraqis that no matter how much of a mess they make, the American military will always be there to clean it up.

That is why I believe we must begin a phased redeployment of American troops to signal to the government and people of Iraq, and others who have a stake in stabilizing the country — that ours is not an open-ended commitment. They must step up.

To be completely honest, I am not 100 percent sold on this strategy for handling the President’s Iraq war, but then again there are no good answers, as Sen. Obama says. My overwhelming concern is that, despite the folly of the venture to begin with, leaving too soon would make Iraq a nest for terrorists, who will then turn their focus from American troops to American cities. This may be preventable without additional troops, and even with a phased withdrawal, so long as our attention is kept on the security situation there. But leaving behind a smoldering pit of resentment and the potential to organize attacks could turn a disastrous foreign entanglement into a catastrophic national nightmare, a situation that absolutely must be avoided.

With that said, Sen. Obama’s position is well-reasoned and wisely supported with details and military endorsements. It also positions him well for a Democratic primary, where his desire to begin a withdrawal will put him to the left of Sen. Clinton, moderated by the fact that he doesn’t call for a specific timeline. Not a bad position to stake out for himself, and one I think many Americans can get behind, myself included.