Barack Obama, Senator of a Presidential Campaign, made some odd remarks the other day. Misstatements have percolated his time on the stump. Laboring to hold President Bush responsible for hardships in the tornado-struck Kansas town of Greensburg, Obama construed the storm as taking, instead of a dozen, Greensburg's entire population and that of seven municipalities neighboring. The senator, last Thursday, made a moral calculation as awkward as his arithmetic one.
He tried a ratiocinative answer to the question of enabling bedlam in Iraq while retreating to somewhere. The word "genocide" was used. "If that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of US forces," Obama replied, "you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven't done." He used Darfur in similar contrast, but then added, "Those of us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea." Are you serious, Senator? might have been the rejoinder if it weren't the Associated Press. "There are still going to be US forces in the region that could intercede, with an international force, on an emergency basis," although "[w]e cannot achieve a stable Iraq with a military."
Several questions line up. One, why roughly twice the size of forces in the Congo as in Iraq; two, how do a pair-and-a-half of unaffiliated, abject African countries reflect on a fragile but popularly willed democracy, an American ally, that will suffer as a direct result of a decision to leave; three, will the position shift once Obama is informed that United Nations-hired soldiers are in the Congo already, fresh from a whitewashed investigation on trafficking; four, will it shift once somebody tells Obama he wanted UN troops in Darfur last September; five, is genocide rampant here cause to shrug at genocide there; six, if arms can't bring Iraq under order, how will an intercessory detachment make "stable" a place overrun by al Qaeda, Ba'athists or Iranian-backed gangs serving the former village council as hors d'oeuvres?
Senator Obama is conveying politics, yet also innocence of fact. Iraq is a risky place to be for journalists because — can you guess? — the enemy murders just about anybody including, maybe especially, those foreign and native who exercise a license to the press. The leftward media usually lays the onus on the United States or the West, as per its prejudice, though the disjunction at which most reporters file on the front is large and serial. Most bureaus don't know firsthand what is going on. If you believe Michael Yon, who can be ebullient but is very good, the military hasn't allowed journalists to overcome their inculcations against the uniform by even allowing, let alone inviting, very many of them to be embedded with troops like Yon.
But, but, but — Michael Yon and a few other reporters, notably one Michael Totten, whose desires to win show in scrupulous observation and criticism of our side, have been writing that the enemy in Iraq is foundering under an assault. Also, that one reason Iraqis are reluctant to stand up is a fear of Americans hightailing.
Totten is with a unit stationed in a Baghdad district sluiced of terrorists and gangs. His latest story followed a night patrol — as always, soldiers grumble over press coverage and Iraqis, however oleaginous, are decent. After a few hundred words and some pictures — residents, their children, teenage cruisers and a gracile Army interpreter from Lebanon — Totten published a quote from a Lieutenant Colonel. What was recorded should have been commonsense but in our time is revelatory. Still, it knocked over the assertion that terrorism is a unifying response to any Western presence: "We have tight relationships with some of the people whose sons are detainees...they don't approve of their children joining al Qaeda or the Mahdi Army."
Possibly, the same would not like Washington to tell them See you later, Alligator. Closing Totten's report was a description of what the enemy will exact on families simply when our soldiers are a block or two away. A modern proverb teaches that war inures as it lasts, year after year. Most of us tacitly know it as the fair society turned sordid, though in this case it is an abstractionist senator with little excuse for unknowing, who mistook Iraq for part of a hand to discard.