[Peace-discuss] Scahill on Obama and Iraq

[Morton K. Brussel]

Jeremy isn't happy. Obama is clearly provong to be deceitful. --mkb


…"I want to be very clear," Obama told the military audience. "We sent  
our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein's regime -- and you  
got the job done." Perhaps it bears remembering that "removing Saddam"  
was justification two or three offered by the Bush administration  
after the WMD fraud was exposed.

"We kept our troops in Iraq to help establish a sovereign government,"  
Obama went on, "and you got the job done." (The idea that Prime  
Minister Nouri al-Maliki regime is either sovereign or a government is  
hotly debated in Iraq.) "And we will leave the Iraqi people with a  
hard-earned opportunity to live a better life -- that is your  
achievement; that is the prospect that you have made possible."

As much as could be said about this, perhaps the best response was  
delivered on Friday by Washington Post correspondent Thomas Ricks, who  
knows the situation in Iraq about as well as any journalist.

"We won't know for 10 or 15 years whether we actually did something  
right, even in removing Saddam Hussein," he said on MSNBC. "We may  
very well end up with a strongman, stronger than Saddam, closer to  
Tehran and certainly will be anti-American. That's in some ways the  
best-case scenario if that country holds together."

Regardless of what happens down the line, the world knows the truth  
about the lies that both Democrats and Republicans promoted in support  
of Bush's war against Iraq. Rather than inspire hope among Iraqis, the  
U.S. occupation has devastated their country and opened Iraq's gates  
for unprecedented violence and instability in their country and the  
region.

Obama, the candidate, used to riff on these truths on the campaign  
trail. The contradiction between President Obama's speech at Camp  
Lejeune and his rhetoric before he was elected should serve as a  
warning to those who take his words at face value. But more important,  
combined with his plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan, Obama's  
adoption of key lies from Bush's Iraq narrative should be seen as a  
dangerous indicator of things to come.

The rest of the article is at Alternet.org:

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/129362/all_troops_out_by_2011_not_so_fast%3B_why_obama%27s_iraq_speech_deserves_a_second_look/