Obama's Iraq War Speech: Operation New Yawn

Having first watched President Obama give an awkward talk to a group of soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas, followed by his monotone prime-time speech, I was left with the impression that he tried as best he could to heap praise on a people whose commitment and purpose are so very foreign to him.

It had to be tough to stand in a room surrounded by a group of warriors who have done his bidding and fought street corner to street corner. They know the president hasn’t been there. The president knows he hasn’t been there. And so how does he connect?

Every soldier, sailor, airman and marine that has joined the military since 9-11 knows they are going to combat. It isn’t about the college money or the so-called perks. It is simply about performing one’s duty.

And so President Obama should have had one major objective for his speech, which was to give 100% of the credit to the fighting men and women who achieved victory on behalf of the United States in Iraq.

Though he did so with the passion of Ben Stein teaching economics to Ferris Bueller, I believe he tried his best to communicate that the war-fighters deserve the bulk of the credit for the outcome in Iraq, Vice President Biden’s penchant for credit-taking notwithstanding. Whether this compliment is one that he means sincerely or merely a platitude remains to be seen. Regardless, his droning will have some troops calling it Operation New Yawn instead of Operation New Dawn.

The other objectives I believed he should have sought to achieve were to admit that he did not support this war and in no way could he take credit for either its success or the time-line.

I think again he tried to come clean by giving tepid praise to President Bush while also obliquely referencing his disagreement with the war. Frankly, though, he did more than disagree. As a senator, he voted to not support the surge and he voted to not fund the troops deployed in combat. Without the surge and without the money, the troops would have withered on the vine and we would be looking at a very different Iraq and Middle East today. Then-Senator Obama buckled under pressure and defeatism, agreeing with Senator Harry Reid’s comment, “The war is lost.”

Now, to assert that “his plan” and timeline are something to be heralded is unkind to the truth. The time-line was set in motion by President Maliki of Iraq and codified by President Bush when he signed the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) weeks before leaving office. That agreement, among other things, established that by June 2009 U.S. forces would be out of the cities and that by December 2011, we would be completely out of Iraq.

True, Obama picked August 31, 2010 as his mark on the wall for having brigade combat teams out of Iraq, but if you do a linear regression time-line of how long it would take to get 145,000 troops out of Iraq from February 2009 to December 2011, netting out the redeployment of the surge brigades who were already leaving, we are precisely on glide path. We’re left wondering about the the timing of this Obama milestone and its suspicious proximity the November mid-term elections. One could deduce that the entire gambit is a political machination meant to shore up Democrats’ flagging campaigns.

Words do mean things, even if lacking in enthusiasm, and I found myself listening as he intoned Americans to pull together and restore the economy in the same fashion the troops have executed every mission given them overseas. Ever skeptical of a man who appears so intimidated by, and uncomfortable around, the men and women he purports to lead, I was wishing that he could demonstrate a flicker of passion that would ignite within me a belief that he would rally the nation out of this recession.

The All Volunteer Force has performed remarkably well during this incredibly challenging series of rotations into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think the president makes a sound point when he acknowledges that Americans have an equal responsibility to do on the domestic front what our fighting men and women did on the international security front.

If only President Obama loved the troops as much as he loved the idea of being president we may have seen some of that campaign emotion and energy. Instead, we had a flat delivery of some very good words that without the passion leave one wondering if he meant any of it.