Obama on Iraq: Long-Term War Impact?

31 August 2010 |permalink | email article

The President speaks tonight about Iraq. With almost 50,000 troops still in the country he’ll trumpet “the end of combat operations” but steer clear of George Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” gaffe.

His comments will focus on Iraq: the state of Iraqi democracy, the level of violence, the impact seven years of war has had on Iraqi society. How much he will touch on America’s reputation for effectiveness, ability to organize a coalition, influence the Middle East and think like a global power is unclear.

Anne Applebaum, a foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Post, contends that all of the above is a roundabout way of saying that “the assessment of the Iraq war is a project for the next decade, not the next week.”

Before speaking, she believes Obama might ponder the words of the former Chinese leader Zhou Enlai – who, when asked to assess the long-term impact of the French Revolution, allegedly told Richard Nixon that “it’s too early to tell.”
California politics

It’s not a surprise that former Gov. Pete Wilson who provided GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman a valuable endorsement in the June 8 primary, and declared that she would be “tough as nails” on illegal immigration, has become almost invisible heading into the fall campaign. Wilson, her chairman, and adored by conservatives for championing Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative that sought to deny public services to illegal immigrants, is now toxic in Whitman’s uphill effort to woo Latinos and independent voters.

Read ‘em and weep

“Imam Hussein Obama,” Rush Limbaugh declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.” The slander prompted this retort from Paul Krugman: “Where are the statements, from the former president or those in his inner circle, preaching tolerance and denouncing anti-Islam hysteria. On this issue, as on many others, the GOP is offering a nearly uniform profile in cowardice.”

“For all the attention paid the right-wingers there, they never really took up the whole place. They were just more mediagenic than everyone else.” – California historian Kevin Starr on a New York Times report that the number of registered Republicans in Orange County in June dropped to 43 percent, the lowest number in 70 years. Whites now make up only 45 percent of the population, in a county teeming with Latinos. 

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