National Review Gives Two Cheers For Iraq Withdrawal

Speaking of dogs that haven’t barked about Obama’s Iraq withdrawal, National Review editorializes cautiously in favor of the plan. Once editor Rich Lowry called

Rian Mcconnell

News

Last updated: Jul 31, 2020 | Mar 02, 2009

Speaking of dogs that haven’t barked about Obama’s Iraq withdrawal, National Review editorializes cautiously in favor of the plan. Once editor Rich Lowry called the Democrats “the party of defeat” for embracing timetables for withdrawal; now his magazine is implicitly accepting a defeat of its own:

The magazine doesn’t say why it thinks the draw-down is too rapid, but presumably it couldn’t run an editorial offering full-fledged support to a Democratic president. This is the route the editorial takes to square the circle:

Wrong on both counts. Obama did not inherit a “scheme” for withdrawal. What he inherited was a Status of Forces Agreement with a withdrawal timetable that Bush was outflanked by the Iraqis into accepting. Bush deserves credit for bowing to that reality, but the fact that the SOFA included a timetable at Iraqi insistence was most certainly not what he wanted. It did not include any formula for drawing down troops before 2011. Nor was it in fact “inevitable” that troop levels would in fact come down: had John McCain been elected president, he could have followed through on his campaign rhetoric and sought to revise the SOFA. Instead, he flip-flopped.

From Obama’s perspective — and the antiwar movement’s perspective — whatever path conservatives need to take to embrace withdrawal is welcome. The important thing is that conservatives who for years said that a timetable-based withdrawal would be a disaster have acquiesced to the left’s position.