Is Iraq Obama’s legacy?

Opinion: September 3, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

It was hardly surprising that President Barack Obama shied away from the previous administration’s premature 2003 characterization of a “mission accomplished” in proclaiming the official end of the U.S. combat role in Iraq.

Aides had cautioned this would be no “victory lap,” and as Obama observed in Tuesday night’s Oval Office address, “Our combat mission is ending, but our commitment to Iraq’s future is not.”

With 50,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq, additional casualties and costs are inevitable, though in declining numbers.

But if one accepts Obama’s realistic but limited definition of the U.S. mission as having given Iraq “the opportunity to embrace a new destiny,” the last seven years have made that possible in a way that did not exist in those misleadingly optimistic days after the lightning overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Whether Iraqis can achieve that destiny remains uncertain. So, too, is the larger issue, certain to be the subject of an extended historical debate, of whether the massive U.S. investment of human and financial resources was worthwhile.

Iraq’s political instability and its leaders’ difficulty in providing basic services show it is far from what President George W. Bush predicted would be “an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.”

Costs, risks

More important, as Obama noted, the U.S. continues to suffer the economic consequences of the way Bush undertook vast expenditures and troop commitments while consistently minimizing the costs and the risks.

“The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people,” Obama said, declaring that spending $1 trillion on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has “short-changed investments in our own people and contributed to record deficits.”

And the U.S. effort to stabilize Afghanistan, which was far more involved than Iraq in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, continues to suffer from the mistaken decision to attack Iraq.

The decision to emphasize Iraq over Afghanistan was one of several miscalculations. The Bush administration rejected suggestions it would need more troops to subdue Iraq, pooh-poohed critics who said the war would prove far more costly financially and ignored warnings that it would be far harder to manage a defeated Iraq than to defeat it.

‘Surge’

To be sure, the enterprise might have been even more disastrous had it not been for the desperate 2007 effort to pour in American troops in a last-ditch military “surge” that helped to arrest Iraq’s downward spiral and paved the way for the U.S.-Iraqi agreement for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

Bush deserves credit for persisting in the face of bipartisan carping, from critics including then-Sen. Obama, though it’s probably also true that political pressures in both countries and U.S. diplomatic efforts contributed to the climate that made U.S. withdrawal possible.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.