Where Credit Is Due

When I got to the gym this morning, my preferred elliptical machine was occupied, so instead of spending the first hour of my day with ESPN, I spent it with Fox News. The topic of discussion this morning was President Obama's impending address on the end of the American "combat mission" in Iraq.

Specifically, the anchors and their guests were discussing whether or not President Obama would "give credit where credit is due". The "credit" in this case, according to Fox News, is "due" to George W. Bush.

Since George W. Bush endorsed the strategy of the "surge" in Iraq in 2007 and since then-Senator Obama opposed said strategy, now-President Obama should focus his speech tonight on giving credit to George W. Bush and, presumably, asking all citizens for their forgiveness for his own lack of appreciation for the strategic genius of his predecessor.

To say that George W. Bush is due any credit vis a vis Iraq is to say that an arsonist deserves credit for pissing on a fire he has set.

It is also to fundamentally misunderstand what the Surge was and what it accomplished. The Surge was intended to mitigate the raging Sunni insurgency against American soldiers as well as the incipient civil war between Sunni and Shia.

The Surge did, indeed, halt the worst levels of violence in Iraq. But it did not do so by military victory or by changing hearts and minds. It did so by distributing pallets of shrink-wrapped 100 dollar bills to the people who had been killing American soldiers for 4 years.

The Surge was about buying loyalty from the enemy, simply bribing the enemy to behave a bit better. This is nothing new in the history of warfare, and in my mind its infinitely preferable to killing. But genius it ain't.

Mr. Bush does not deserve credit for ordering the surge, because the surge was simply a last-ditch effort to salvage the train wreck that Mr. Bush had unleashed. Again, if an arsonist pisses on his own fire in an attempt to put it out after it has already killed a few thousand people, that doesn't make him a hero.

If anyone deserves credit it is Mr. Obama, because he spoke out forcefully about the folly of the original invasion. But even Mr. Obama does not deserve much credit. Because he still won't speak the truth about Iraq.

We all know that at some point during his speech tonight our president will say something along these lines: "regardless of how we felt about the wisdom of invading Iraq, all Americans can agree that we owe a great debt to our military for protecting our freedoms".

And therein lies the lie. Our military certainly made enormous sacrifices. But none of us were made more free because of them. That is the ultimate tragedy. And until we can be honest about that, we haven't learned a thing.