Pete Hegseth is not your ordinary soldier. He is a graduate of Princeton University, who then served both at Guantanamo and in Iraq.
As the saying goes, these experiences have taught him a little about a little.
Mr. Hegseth, who Currently is the CEO of Concerned Veterans For America, has a point of view on how we have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq – and has written an extremely valuable commentary on this subject at nationalreview.com.
Here is a key part of that commentary:
Butwas the mission in Iraq doomed from the beginning? Of course not. Thesurge of 2007-2008 answered that question – turning a hopelesssituation into a beaconof possibility. Violence was abated, sectarian reconciliation wasoccurring, and politics was replacing street fighting. The gains ofthe surge, as GeneralPetraeus said, were “significant, but fragile and reversible.”
In2009, Iraq had burgeoning oil resources, a growing and increasinglymulti-ethnic army, and a functioning political process. It was farfrom perfect, but the situation was on such strong footing by 2010that Vice President Biden boldlystated,
Iam very optimistic about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of thegreatest achievements of this administration . . . I\’ve beenimpressed by how they have been deciding to use the political processrather than guns to settle their differences.
Whilethe gains in Iraq were indeed impressive, Biden – and the entireObama administration – was dead wrong for two reasons: First, theaccomplishment was never this administration’\’. Second, what hecalled their greatest accomplishment is now their spectacularfailure. In the end, President Obama removed the two key ingredientsneeded for such an achievement: commitment and resolve.
Was he committed to the cause? Did he care? Was he invested in finishing a flawed, difficult, but extremely important war? The clear answer is no. President Obama was subbed onto the geopolitical football field in the fourth quarter with a two-score lead. He sat on the ball – worse, he willfully fumbled repeatedly – and the other team(s) took full advantage. The failure we\’re watching today, of Sunni Islamists marching on an Iranian-backed Baghdad regime, started the minute he took the field in January of 2009.
Strong words, to be sure. But do they make sense?
We can argue over whether the US should have gone into Iraq in the first place. We can argue over how the war was pursued under President Bush.
But what we cannot argue over is that, however it came to be, we had achieved considerable success in Iraq. Read that quote from Vice President Biden again – as he tried to convince us that credit for the success in Iraq should accrue to President Obama, rather than President Bush.
But now that Iraq is falling apart – the entire descent taking place during President Obama\’s presidency, who is there to blame? Bush, who was out of office for over a year when Mr. Biden was heralding it as a success?
There is only one answer: the one President who has been in office through every second of Iraq\’s fall from a budding democracy to an imminent shari\’a law hellhole.
And now, with far too little being offered years too late, Mr. Obama wants to sell the premise that “Hey, I\’m on top of this and I did everything I could”.
Are you buying?
