The Political Whore

By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor

Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio. This is his first post as a PoHo contributor.

Perhaps because of the mind blowing dollars attached to his policy prescriptions to change the country, President Obama’s announcement last Friday that he will withdraw all combat forces from Iraq by next summer and all remaining U.S. troops by the end of 2011 hardly registered as a momentous event on the national scene.. That is, if you go by the measure of how the D.C. press corps addresses news emanating from the Obama administration, which sometimes seems to be viewed through the prism of “How pissed are Congressional Republicans about it?”

In fact, John (Country First) McCain — he of the ‘I’d rather win a war and lose a campaign” mantra that he attacked then-Sen. Obama with most of last year when discussing Iraq — came out to announce that he thought the withdrawal “reasonable.”

In fact, it was Democrats who were disappointed by the fact that 50,000 residual forces are expected to still be in country by the end of next summer.

Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid expressed mild astonishment upon hearing those numbers, but seemed to be back safely in the President’s camp by Friday night. Even Dennis Kucinich didn’t seem that ruffled on MSNBC’s Hardball, in challenging the notion that 50,000 troops in Iraq constituted a withdrawal

But there are a variety of factors that prevents the new plan – which places a blueprint on ending of the most controversial, divisive wars in American history – from making bigger headlines.

The first and foremost reason being, there is no guarantee that the U.S. will be completely out of Iraq at the end of 2011, as forecast by the President.

But even before that realization kicks in, it should be noted that Obama’s plan is what was already previously agreed upon with President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki last fall.

The Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA , calls for the same timetable withdrawal (the SOFA still needs to be subject to a national referendum this summer in Iraq).

But will we be able to get completely out of Iraq in less than 3 years? No less a respected reporter on such matters as Thomas Ricks, the special military reporter for the Washington Post, doesn’t believe so.

In his new book, “The Gamble,” Ricks speculates that the U.S. must stay there until at least 2015. He writes that “a smaller but long-term U.S. military presence is probably the best case scenario. He also writes that “there is also the alarming possibility that, years after a pullout, the U.S. military eventually would have to return to fight another war or impose peace on chaos”.

Of course, the main reason why coverage of Iraq has been reduced so much in the media is the relative reduction of violence, which began shortly after “Mission Accomplished “ was declared in the spring of ’03, and then completely spiraled out of control in 2006. Much credit has been given to the so called “Surge” of troops that began in early 2007, coupled with the “Sunni Awakening,” in which tribal leaders switched sides (and were amply compensated financially and militarily).

Of course, there are a lot of people disappointed by the president’s announcement on Friday. They reside mostly on the anti-war left. The Answer Coalition called the president’s address from Camp Lejeune a “disappointment for anyone who was hoping that Obama would renounce the illegal occupation of Iraq.”

The group also responded by declaring a mass march on the Pentagon next month, both against the continuing occupation of Iraq and the escalation of war in Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of more troops are expected to be deployed this year.

And as both former Pinellas County congressional candidate Samm Simpson and Phyllis Benis, from the Institute for Policy Studies have stated, neither SOFA’s nor the president’s call addresses the 150,000 U.S. paid contractors. (However, A U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, which took effect Jan. 1, does give the Iraqis the authority to determine which Western contractors operate in their country.)

Benis also commented in a recent op-ed the ambiguity revolving around the 50-plus U.S. Military bases in Iraq.

As has been frequently cited by conservatives, while George Bush’s poll ratings sat snuggly in the upper 20’s for the last 2 years of his presidency, he was joined there in 2007 by the institution known as Congress. The GOP loves to brand House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (“The San Francisco Democrat”) as representative of all that’s wrong in America (where she has replaced Hillary Clinton and before than Ted Kennedy in fundraising letters), and have continued that line of attack early on in the Obama administration.

I would argue that one reason that the Democratic-led Congress’ ratings never rebounded from how Republicans were faring before they were voted out of office in ‘06 was that there is a contention from a certain amount of voters that they were voting to get the U.S. out of Iraq, and they were terribly disappointed that didn’t happen in 2007.

Republicans such as Karl Rove have always disagreed with the notion that it was Iraq that lost them the House in ’06, countering that it was the “Culture of Corruption” emanating from the Jack Abramoff and Mark Foley scandals that did them in, as well as their lack of adherence to solid conservative principles of government ( McCain once again :”We came to change Washington, and instead it changed us”)

But getting back to whether or not we will know for sure the possibility that America’s tragic intervention will really end in 3 years time, we did have Secretary Gates speak on Meet the Press yesterday.

Gates played down the chances of any major slowdown in the withdrawal plan.

Calling the chances of still having US forces in Iraq by 2012 “fairly remote,” Gates said to those unhappy at the size of the transition force hovering between 35,000 to 50,000, “in the absence of any new agreement with the Iraqis, we have to be at zero by the end of 2011. So, that 50,000 or 35,000 is a way-station on the way to zero.”

Reporter Thomas Ricks says that Obama could be falling into the trap of Bush in painting a sunnier scenario about the facts on the ground in Iraq than are warranted. And of course, that is that pesky situation in Afghanistan/Pakistan, where the President has ordered 17,000 more troops to the region, with the promise of more to come, leading some anti-war activists to begin calling this “Obama’s Iraq”.

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