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Obama to reduce Iraq strength to 3,000, lose election…

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  September 6th, 2011 at 03:30 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

…and set up the bank shot in 2016 for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, apparently:

The Obama administration has decided to drop the number of U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of the year down to 3,000, marking a major downgrade in force strength, multiple sources familiar with the inner workings and decisions on U.S. troop movements in Iraq told Fox News.

[snip]

This shift is seen by various people as a cost-saving measure and a political measure. The only administration official fighting for at least 10,000 forces to stay in Iraq at the end of the year was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sources said. But she has lost the battle.

No, I don’t actually think that this scenario is actually what’s unfolding: nobody in the administration’s brave enough to try it.  But, speaking cynically, this would work as a long term strategy.  Accept that the election’s lost, set up a disaster for the Republican President to inherit and take the blame for, and put the one brave truth-teller in position to come over in 2016 and save the day.  It’s not optimal, but then it’s going to take a couple of years for the Democrats to fix everything that Obama’s done to their party.  They might as well sabotage things for the GOP in the meantime.

You know: if it were true, I’d almost be impressed at this play… except that the only people that are more worried about this scenario than would be our generals in the field are the Kurds (and, for that matter, the rest of the Iraqis).  Which makes sense; after all, they’re the ones who will be doing the bleeding.

Via @cayankee.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: What’s probably actually happening is that they’re testing whether people will freak out over reducing troop strength, with said freaking out preferably happening over on the GOP side (and thus roiling our Presidential primary further).  Passive-aggressive nonsense like that is something that this administration does have the nerve for.

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  • victrola

    Here’s the thing, we all know that this decision is about one think: helping Obama in his tough reelection bid. It’s certainly not about what’s best for our armed forced, since our brilliant military strategist, Barack Obama Patton, overruled what our Generals’ advised. So looking purely through the lens of reelection, how’s it going to look if Iraq is in a state of crisis and Baghdad is in flames with US troops in some sort of disgraceful Vietnam-style exit?

    Even IF everything goes according to plan and the withdrawal is clean, he promised his left-wing base we’d be COMPLETELY out of Iraq 16 months after he was inaugurated, so he’s not exactly fulfilling a promise with this nonsense.

    Most Americans perceive that both Iraq and Afghanistan were essentially “won” at the end of Bush’s term, since all the heavy lifting had been done. If these parts of the Middle East are on fire while he’s trying to win a second term, you may see a 40 state GOP landslide.

  • afreemaniii

    Obama has two choices to hope for re-election.

    1. Come back to the middle and try to work with Republicans and gain support from the independents.
    2. Go further left to appease his base and hope they carry the election for him.

    This move would be in line with option number 2. I don’t see that option winning him the election.

    The next six months are going to be interesting because it will be all about his campaign and trying to get re-elected not about leading the country into the future.

  • tecumsehtea

    If Obama were to keep just one promise, this is the one I wish he would keep — bring our troops home from Afghanistan. Of course, he can’t keep any promises — just not in his nature. He doesn’t care one bit about our troops, or about winning any war other than the one he started with the American people.

  • http://www.usdebateboard.com usdebateboard

    much as his party tried to sabotage it in the previous administration.

    Nope. He’ll keep the both on life support while he guts their troop and funding commitments.

  • toothpick

    A commander-in-chief initiates one war (Libya) and cancels another in-progress (Iraq) with barely a public peep. During the same time period he demands to address a joint session of Congress to rally the nation behind yet another spendulus boondoggle to build a few bridges, remodel some schools, and hire lots and lots of bureaucrats to make sure nobody actually gets hired in the private sector.

    Remember the good old days, when Presidents would address the country to make the case for going to war, and work in the background on the legislative process to get their spending priorities enacted?

    At this point all I can think is “WTF?” And by that I do NOT mean Winning The Future.

  • http://www.gmsplace.com/ civil truth

    His hubris may well be his undoing. Unfortunately, it’s our brave soldiers who will be the sacrificial lambs for Obama’s sins.

  • snowshooze

    That is pretty much the outcome of the Obama re-election strategy as I see it.
    Anyone elected to be Commander in Chief of the Armed forces should at least be fit to lead.
    He isn’t even fit to serve.
    Anyone who places lives at risk solely for their own personal gain…
    I guess I really don’t need to elaborate.

  • easyb

    …he might make his base happy, but he’ll lose the election. Going further to the left will make it that much harder for him to nab the swing states. Appeasing the deep blue states doesn’t help him get to 270.

  • The_Gadfly

    Pity The Big 0 has never learned anything from dead white guys, even the recently dead ones.

  • aesthete

    Afghanistan was the “good war” that Booooosh took his eye off of to fight in Iraq, remember? In fact, he repeatedly promised a “civilian surge” in Afghanistan, attempting (and utterly failing) to replicate the surge in Iraq. That said, I sure wish someone was man enough to actually get us out of that hole — preferably a Republican, since it’s already assumed by most “non-partisan” observers that Republicans are the sort of heartless SOBs who would intentionally cause the humanitarian crises (note the plural) that will result when we leave.

  • aesthete

    OEF and OIF under Bush won’t exactly be going down in the history books as masterstrokes of military strategy, either — and Obama has more often than not followed the Boooooosh ruleset when it comes to the latter (which is proof of what we already knew of the anti-war movement’s rank hypocrisy). I certainly wouldn’t put it past this administration and his party to drop a humanitarian crisis on the laps of the next Republican president, but I do doubt that they would make it that obvious. I think your speculation is more or less right on: if Obama reduces troop levels in Iraq significantly for political gain, it will be closer to the election, IMO. This is just a feeler.

  • johnt

    Obama figures this could be his only term, though much depends on his use of force and fraud in ’12. So he might as well get on with his one term program of defeat and pain now.
    He will have the media and the rest of the insane supporting him.

  • pashley1411

    with Obama not showing much concern for his “legacy”, I think people should be looking for the ultimate bankshot. Congress isn’t going along with ushering in the Progressive utopia, and so can be disregarded.

    So the post Nov-2 Obama, looking to the base, directs the Fed to buy-out the bonds of the busted-out blue states. You know who they are. The blue states are then bailed out to the tune of billions, and can restart the debt runup from a new zero.

    The successor administration is stuck trying to unload billions of state bonds on the market. And when the state can’t pay interest on their debt, well, its the same as the state unemployment funds “borrowing” from the Federal government now. Who has the guts to pull the plug on them?

  • rbdwiggins

    Iran was surrounded… Until the same people who brought us Plamegate, also brought forth this garbage.

    So much National Treasure lost…