Why Obama's Iraq Speech Matters

Lt. Gen. Charles Jacoby, Vice President Joseph Biden, and George Stephanopoulos at Camp Victory, Baghdad, July 4, 2009 (Image: Adam Weinsten)I SPENT THE FOURTH OF July last year in Baghdad with Joe Biden, and he told me something. Or rather, I overheard him tell George Stephanopoulos something. As a media handler for the military, I’d been shadowing the veep all day – sharing lunch with him and his son Beau’s Delaware National Guard unit; standing around as he greeted every member personally; helping set up a broadcast studio for his interview with the ABC news host. After the cameras stopped rolling and Secret Service arranged his next jaunt, Biden started talking with Stephanopoulos in hushed tones about his real reason for coming to Iraq: his visit the previous day with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Most of the day Biden looked and sounded old. His voice seemed broken by Camp Victory’s tawny dust. If you looked hard, you could almost see the long strands of white hair on his crown retreating in sparse waves. But as he spoke off camera to Stephanopoulos, the arch in his back disappeared. The bass returned to his speech. Aw shucks gave way to Aw shit.

Iraq’s leader, the vice president said, was slow on the uptake, the idea that he wouldn’t enjoy US military support much longer simply not registering. The two countries’ bilateral Status of Forces Agreement would be honored, and America’s Mesopotamian adventure would close on schedule. Maliki’s army and police would have to make Iraqis feel safe without foreign training wheels. Graft and corruption would have to be tackled. Popular votes would have to be held as scheduled – and their results respected.

Biden to Stephanopoulos, the political insider-cum-newsman: “I said, ‘Look, if you wanna screw your country, it's your country.’” Biden smiled. “I didn't say that” to Maliki, he added, but the words he did use were enough to give the prime minister “that sort of deer-in-the-headlights look.”

The vice president was emphatic; the smile left his face. “We're leaving,” he told Stephanopoulos.

Idle talk between old Beltway hands, perhaps. But it was Biden and his boss, not any twangy, tough-talking Republican or neocon, who delivered on that talk. With a short speech Tuesday, President Obama brought Operation Iraqi Freedom to an official close, a move that paradoxically brings Iraq closer to freedom than it’s been in some time.

A terrible freedom, perhaps: Somewhere on the order of 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died under US occupation – 501 alone in August, the final month of “combat operations.” Many of those dying now are former collaborators with the US military, most notably members of al-Sahwa, the Sunni Awakening movement that helped marginalize radical Islamic fighters. The government is fast losing whatever legitimacy it had with the populace; beyond the uneven security it provides, the Maliki regime seems unable or unwilling to negotiate an alliance after the nation’s split parliamentary elections last spring. Freedom means the freedom to fail.

Critics on both the American right and left are seizing on that instability, and on Obama's Oval Office elegy, with a self-serving sophistry that would impress Protagoras himself. Neoconservatives say Obama is inviting defeat in a war against terror. Neoliberals say he owes something more to a country the US broke beyond recognition. Traditional right-wingers say it’s President Bush, not Obama, who deserves credit for the withdrawal. Traditional liberals say that 50,000 still-standing troops in Iraq a withdrawal doth not make. Everyone says the president's speech was piffle.

From a political standpoint, all this is unsurprising. Barack Obama really does seem to believe in post-partisanship and compromise, and just as in all his previous fights, here he’s an army of one: His compromise makes everyone equally unhappy.

But I’m pretty happy with Operation New Dawn. Politico-style point-keeping is entirely the wrong framework for reading what happened this week in Iraq. A presidential administration made a foreign policy pledge, and it stayed true to its word. Iraq is still broken, yes. But so is America, domestically and globally. Only kept promises – promises like Obama’s on Iraq – will ultimately restore the national health.