Obama Pushes Back on Reporter's Iraq Questions at Unity Convention

[jefferson_dem]

Run time: 02:07 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SE-ONd4ACw   Posted on YouTube: July 27, 2008 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: July 27, 2008 By DU Member: jefferson_dem Views on DU: 1900

 
Bravo! Well done, Barack!

[Hope And Change]

1. K & R!

[silverweb]

2. He makes me smile.

He cuts right through their bullshit each and every time.


GObama! :applause: GObama!

[provis99]

3. he should have pointed out

that things in Afghanistan are collapsing, because of troops being pushed into Iraq rather than Afghanistan.

[rusty quoin]

4. Ratnesar was not going to ask Obama if his not backing the surge was a mistake.

But since it's a given that this John McCain incredible surge fixed all things wrong with Iraq, couldn't Barack be presidential and admit he was wrong.

[baldguy]

5. The objective of the "surge" was primarily politcal stability.

The violence was supposed to be thus reduced BECAUSE of that stability.

Instead, Bush has allowed the various parties to eliminate the opposition targets available to them - and so violence has decreased.

Everyone that can be killed is now dead. TA-DA! The "surge" has worked!

But still no political stability on the horizon.

[alcibiades_mystery]

6. The Success of the Surge is dependent on a failed state, period

Everyone taking the long view can see this. The surge strategy basically bought time for the general counterinsurgency plan of bribing various parties, and specifically the Sahwa groups (Awakening Council). Why do these bribes have to be paid? Because the Shia government will not build equitable wealth sharing with the Sunni,. and the Sunni have no natural resources to draw on. So, the Sunni can avoid falling into utter economic catastrophe in one of two eays: they can essentially steal resources from the Shia areas (this has been the strategy of the Baath party and the determining factor in Iraqi history for 50 years), or they can get that money somewhere else (i.e., US taxpayer funded protection money). During the insurgency, they largely operated through choice 1, causing chaos in Iraq in order to get to a point where the Shia would submit. Since the surge and counterinsurgency pay-offs, they have opted for choice #2, reaping the rewards of US fear by cashing large DoD checks on the first and fifteenth.

But the problem remains clear: The Shia government will not share revenues with the resource-less Sunni regions. Neither, needless to say, will the Kurds. That is a fundamental failure of government, and it is severe and continuing.

Obama's quite right not to sign on to the Surge Victory Hysteria. It is inevitably unstable because it rests on the shakiest foundation imaginable: the complete failure of the Iraqi state apparatus to deal equitably between ethnic groups. It rests on US payoffs as a substitute for a working government. Conservatives should understand intuitively that this arrangement is unsustainable. It is welfare extracted at gunpoint by the Sunni war tribes. Conservatives have argued forever that somebody ON welfare has no incentive to get OFF welfare. It's only their utter and slavish devotion to the flawed neo-conservative dogmas that prevent them from seeing this same dynamic in Iraq. Obama sees it. I'll do you one better: Petraeus sees it, too. He knows that payoffs as counterinsurgency is a short-term fix, not a long-term structure. He knows they need to develop real structures, and they can only do so, as Obama has argued since the beginning, if rapid withdrawal of US forces is a real event on the horizon.

[barack the house]

7. He feels like a man with great gravitas after this trip.His confidence is renewed now he knows the->

world is stongly behind him. Hope takes many global trips renewing friendships and bolstering his potential presidency in the bookmark of history.

[stark6935]

8. I'm sorry to say, but the surge did work

if by work you mean pushed the terrorists back into Afghanistan where they were to begin with. I can't believe nobody brings that up.