Obama, the Media, and Framing the U.S. Exit From Iraq and Afghanistan by Erika G King Professor

Author:Erika G King Professor [Professor, Erika G King]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Process, Leadership, Political Science, Essays
ISBN: 9781317086444
Google: 6Bc3DAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30376876
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Turning the Page on Operation Iraqi Freedom

In a July 2008 New York Times op-ed piece titled “My Plan for Iraq,” presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama recapitulated almost six years of withering criticism of the Iraq War. Declaring that “Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been,” he characterized the conflict as a “grave mistake” and “the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy.” He thus pledged that on his first day in office he would “give the military a new mission: ending this war” and initiate a phased redeployment of U.S. combat troops. Obama emphasized that the drawdown would be undertaken thoughtfully and deliberately; as he memorably phrased it, “We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in” (Obama 2008b).

Opposition to Iraq had been a constant rallying cry for Obama since the fall of 2002, when as a little-known Illinois state senator he had first characterized the proposed incursion against Saddam Hussein as “a dumb war … a rash war,” based “not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics” (Obama 2002). Upon assuming his U.S. Senate seat in 2005, Obama continued to condemn the war, but while his words remained highly critical his attention quickly turned to a more pragmatic issue: how best to overcome the harsh realities the U.S. now faced in the conflict. In every public statement on Iraq, the senator would roundly castigate the Bush administration for a litany of failures from the faulty intelligence used to make the case for war to the extraordinary mismanagement of the war itself. But his primary concern was focusing the national debate on the best outcome for a war in which there unfortunately were “no magic bullets” (Obama 2005).

“War is a serious business,” Obama flatly declared in a speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in November 2005; America therefore needed to cease the Washington “political war” of “talking points and Sunday news shows and spin” and develop “a pragmatic solution to the real war we’re facing in Iraq.” Rather than retreating to the divisive and politically expedient “cut and run or stay the course” rhetoric, those responsible for U.S. national security had to get down to the critical task of devising a strategic approach that would allow the nation to “exit in a responsible way—with the hope of leaving a stable foundation for the future, but at the very least taking care not to plunge the country into an even deeper and, perhaps, irreparable crisis” (Obama 2005).

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