Epitaph for Imperialism? Or, the Death of President Bush Foretold

Today's big foreign policy spin is the report that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has apparently backed Barack Obama's amorphous troop withdrawal plan for Iraq.



There's a malevolently otherworldly reaction to this around the leftosphere, where many appear to suggest that the success of the surge somehow validates the radical left-wing surrender agenda of the Democratic Party and the netroots base. Indeed, the overall response is positively Kafkaesque.

"The Survivor" by George Grosz 1944, Private Collection

In truth, Barack Obama has been consistently wrong on Iraq (see Peter Wehner's devastating portrait of Obama's flailing Iraq policy), especially throughout 2007.



Now, as Jennifer Rubin points out, Obama, in a statement, has seized on Maliki's agreement to a "horizon" framework as an endorsement of the radical meme that Iraq's not the frontline in the war on terror:

Now, instead of vague illusions to a ‘general time horizon,’ it’s time to pressure Iraq’s leaders to reach the political accommodation necessary for long-term stability, and to refocus on strengthening our military and finishing the fight in Afghanistan.

Obama's playing the Afghan card, pandering to the surrender hordes, but as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, if Americans would have quit Iraq according to the pullout demands of the antiwar left, the Iraqis would now be under al Qaeda's totalitarian thumb, and the Islamists would have claimed a victory over the Great Satan:

Bear this in mind next time you hear any easy talk about "the hunt for the real enemy" or any loose babble that suggests that we can only confront our foes in one place at a time.

But there's more afoot today than some kind of political game-changer seen in Maliki's statement. Some on the left are arguing that the entire foreign policy debate over the last six-years is hereby decided in favor of the antiwar nihilists, game, set, and match.



Going even further is Spencer Ackerman, whose unhinged ravings fall categorically beyond the pale of reasonable partisan foreign policy debate:

The Iraq war is and has always been an obscenity, a filthy lie born of avarice and lust for power masquerading as virtue. This is what imperialism looks like. But the age of empire is over. The same hubris that led Bush into the Iraq disaster led him to miscalculate, again and again, over how to entrench it. But now he is impotent, unable to impose his will, and the nakedness of his attempted imposition has led the American and the Iraqi peoples to wake up and end his nightmare. May his war-crimes prosecutor be Iraqi; may his judge be American; and may he die in the Hague.

This is not the talk of someone's who's concerned about the appropriate role of American power in the world, or the proper balance between force and statecraft.



No, Ackerman demonizes the entire thrust of Bush administration foreign policy, and his concluding statement would see President Bush subject to an international authority above American law, prosecuted for alleged crimes against humanity, convicted at the Hague's star chamber, and executed like some murderous Third World tyrant - like, say, Saddam Hussein.



This is the highest stage of moral relativist anti-Americanism, topped-off with a flourish of abject secular demonology.



Can it be any wonder that large numbers of Americans have serious concerns - even fears - for the future of this country under a Barack Obama administration?

See also, Allahpundit, "Maliki: Obama’s 16-Month Timetable Sounds Good; Update: Spiegel Changes Quote."

Image Credit: All Things Beautiful, "The Big Push - To Take America Down A Peg Or Two."

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UPDATE! Welcome Protein Wisdom readers!

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UPDATE II: CNN reports that Nuri al-Maliki has renounced Spiegel's original story, where he was quoted as in agreement with Barack Obama on a 16-month troop withdrawal:

A German magazine quoted Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as saying that he backed a proposal by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months.

"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months," he said in an interview with Der Spiegel that was released Saturday.

"That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes," he said.

But a spokesman for al-Maliki said his remarks "were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately."

I wonder, then, if we're not really at the end of imperialism.



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UPDATE III: Welcome Just One Minute readers!