An Obaminable Lie
A Marine delivers a stinging rebuke to Barack Obama’s incredibly fatuous and self-serving statements claiming his own plan was just as good as the surge, if not better.
I would remind the candidate that the Anbar Salvation Council (which later grew exponentially and developed into al-Sahwa al-Iraq - the Iraq Awakening) started with one man, Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu al-Risha, and seventy men fighting al-Qaeda in defense of their families, not in pursuit of a ‘political’ anything. They simply wanted to live and end al-Qaeda’s assassination and murdering spree against their families and tribe. Sheikh Abdul Sattar, later assassinated by al-Qaeda in Iraq, had seen 10 family members, including 4 brothers, killed by al-Qaeda for their cooperation with US forces. He had had enough.
Obama’s plan - unoriginal and pieced together like a quilt from others against the Iraq war - was entirely Baghdad-centric, about laws and revenue sharing and conferences. The Anbar Awakening had nothing to do with Baghdad when they began and when they turned the neighborhood tides in Ramadi and elsewhere in Anbar province. It was about killing the terrorists before the terrorists killed them. One must, after all, live to ultimately see progress on any scale beyond one’s neighborhoods.
Obama wanted laws written, press conferences, and an immediate pull back of US troops. As Senator Chuck Schumer so brilliantly said at the time about ‘the plan,’ US forces were to withdraw post-haste to the periphery “in more of a counterterrorism role.” This would have abandoned the Anbar Salvation Council - and Anbar Sunnis and Shi’a alike - entirely. It would have been feeding them to the bloodthirsty wolves of al-Qaeda so that domestic American political figures could champion themselves as ‘ending a war’ and conducting business “in more of a counterterrorism role.”
I had assumed Obama would morph into a more reasonable, centrist figure in the general election but if he keeps this up I don’t see how any thinking person could possibly vote for him.
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3 comments
Don’t worry, no thinking person will.
It has just always seemed odd to me that in this day where you need "professional help" for everything, that Congress can’t seem to let the professionals manage the war.
If I was President, I’d hand it all to the Joint Chiefs and go work on the economy, or social security, or something.
"…but if he keeps this up I don’t see how any thinking person could possibly vote for him."
I was going to save this emailed ‘joke’ for some open-thread weekend, but Dave’s very last comment makes it more apropos for now:
"While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year-old Texas rancher whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Obama and his bid to be our President.
The old rancher said, “Well, ya know, Obama is a post turtle.” Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a ‘post turtle’ was. The old rancher said, “When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.”
The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain. “You know he didn’t get up there by himself, he doesn’t belong up there, he doesn’t know what to do while he is up there, and you just wonder what kind of dumb asses put him up there to begin with.”
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