Is President Obama Trying to Succeed in Iraq Or Just Avoid Blame?

I think I may have figured out President Obama’s Iraq strategy: To be able to deny responsibility if (when-?) things go bad.  Let me explain.

By calling “Iraq redux” a multi-year effort, President Obama’s original idea was to set things up so that he could deny responsibility if the result eventually turned out bad and he could claim credit if it was a success (which seems less and less likely).  The idea was that, when President Obama left office, he would say that Iraq 2.0 (or whatever version it is by then) was succeeding.  If it eventually failed, it would be his successor’s fault.  If it worked, it would be because of what he did.  In other words, it would be sort of a reverse of what President Obama did vis-a-vis George W. Bush.  Instead of blaming his predecessor for all the bad things and taking credit for all the good, President Obama would blame his successor for the bad things, while taking credit for the good.

The problem with this strategy (which may be his main “Iraq strategy” is that Iraq may not last that long.  Things may fall apart before January of 2017.  Which may explain Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s comment a couple of weeks ago about the Iraqi forces lacking the will to fight.  It also may be the purpose of the President’s comment Monday explaining why we don’t have a “complete strategy” for training Iraqi troops:

“We don’t yet have a complete strategy because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis, as well about how recruitment takes place, how that training takes place.”

In other words, it’s not my fault.

Of course, one major problem with comments like this, as I said in my post on Secretary Carter’s comment, is: How does this help our relationship with the Iraqis?  Douglas Olivant explained it better in his article a week ago on “Iraq after Ramadi: Saving the Anti-ISIL Strategy”:

“[W]e need to understand how what is said in the United States is heard in Iraq; not what we intend to say, but how it is heard. … Political leaders in the United States should be in the business of bolstering our allies, not making it more difficult to be a friend of the United States. …

… U.S. policymakers need to perform a ‘sanity check’ on their actions and statements, thinking about how these will be received by our ally – both in the capital and ‘on the street.’”

Comments like the President’s and the Defense Secretary’s seem aimed more at avoiding responsibility for what happens in Iraq than actually getting a successful outcome.  Because it is hard to see how these kinds of comments are going to help build our relationship with the Iraqi government – or the Iraqi people. 

Comments

[bob]

He's a real pos