Editorial: 10/28/11

There’s a lot going on in Berkeley right now, and it has become pressing to address our community not only as Californians, but as Americans. On the national level, our country currently has something big to celebrate, despite the otherwise extremely murky political predicament we’re in. In the midst of a broken Congress, an extreme and crippling economic crisis, the accompanying “Occupy” movement to call out the powers that be for not protecting the American people from financial ruin (or protecting our Constitutional rights – see: Oakland), President Obama has just announced that one of the longest wars in American history is finally coming to a close.

One of Obama’s most significant campaign promises back in 2008 was to pull all of our troops out and end the war in Iraq rapidly and responsibly, and by December 31, 2011, a mere two months from now, this promise will come to fruition. It’s been nearly nine years that the United States has been entangled in Iraq; American casualties from the war number around 4,500, while Iraqi deaths are in the hundreds of thousands.

There are a few important implications of this event that ought to be noted. Firstly, it is a huge success for President Obama – his commitment to getting us out of a “war [that] distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize,” as he stated in a July, 2008 campaign speech, is something that many of his supporters did in 2008 and still do in 2011 consider to be one of his most honorable positions. Indeed, that fervent anti-Iraq War stance and his proclaimed urgency in wanting to conclude the war as quickly as possible (earlier in his campaign, he stated that he could have our troops out of Iraq by March of 2008) were in large part what won him the election.

He’s doing a great thing both in being true to his campaign promise and in removing the US from an expensive, unjustified, highly destructive, and (in Berkeley, at least – I can’t speak for the rest of the country) highly unpopular military conflict that has been needlessly draining our resources and endangering our troops for close to a decade. This is a commendable action by Obama, and for that I salute him.

However, it becomes difficult to praise this decision without wondering, “Why now?” The President is making good on a pledge he made as a candidate, but only after three long years of neglecting, tailoring, or entirely reversing many of the positions he once held that set him apart as a candidate. Obviously, this can’t be entirely blamed on him – he’s been working within a broken political system that is extraordinarily flawed and counterproductive. However, not all of the disappointments of Obama’s presidency can be written off as the result of others’ immovable attitudes, and not all of his victories are as straightforward as they may seem. Strangely enough, the fact that the US is withdrawing from Iraq when we are is due to an agreement negotiated between the US and Iraqi governments in 2008 and signed by President Bush at the very end of his final term; as recently as this September, however, the Obama administration was trying to renegotiate that agreement (which ironically had been largely based on Candidate Obama’s suggested plan for withdrawal from the war) in order to keep 3,000-5,000 American troops in Iraq past the end of this year. It was in fact leaders in Iraq, who were opposed to any continued US presence in their country, that forced the original out-by-2012 timeline to remain intact. The moral of this story therefore is not clear-cut.

The President is honoring the American people by shutting down what is arguably one of our government’s hugest mistakes; however, this entire situation stands as a reminder of how thoroughly flawed and unsuccessful much of our governmental mechanism has become.