Yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) published an op-ed in the New York Times outlining his strategy to get out of Iraq. The Washington Post reports that Iraq war supporter Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution was “livid” after reading Obama’s op-ed:“To say you’re going to get out on a certain schedule — regardless of what the Iraqis do, regardless of what our enemies do, regardless of what is happening on the ground — is the height of absurdity,” said O’Hanlon, who described himself as “livid.” “I’m not going to go to the next level of invective and say he shouldn’t be president. I’ll leave that to someone else.”
In 2004, however, O’Hanlon’s sentiments were strikingly similar to Obama’s. In an op-ed titled “Set a date to pull out,” O’Hanlon wrote that “our own enduring commitment to success in Iraq is beginning to work against us.” “Some will see this as cut-and-run,” he said. “It is not.”
O'Hanlon is more angry at the fact that no one calls him as often as they used to and that he doesn't get to go on television when he feels like it. He's gradually drifting, along with dozens of other neoconservative hacks and Republican Bushniks, into a hellish obscurity. O'Hanlon will soon be fighting for space in the Moonie Times, and he knows it. They all know it--and they knew it the moment McCain blurted out that we could stay in Iraq for a hundred years.
What O'Hanlon doesn't get is that the Iraq War is long since decided, and the US needs to leave. Nothing is going to change unless we can draft a 500,000 man Army out of thin air to stabilize the country entirely, take out Maliki, install a Sunni strongman, and turn the country into what it used to be, a bulwark against Shia Islam. Too late, suckers. Iraq is destined to be a client state of Iran, and we drove them there. Your phony surge accomplished nothing, other than kicking the can down the road, and the greatest military debacle in American history is permanently hung around the necks of the Republican Party.
--WS
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