Iraq: Not the fall of Saigon, but certainly the fall of democracy

(By Scott Krane)

President Obama will hit the debate stage next year amidst a severely traumatized economy, dragging the ever-mysterious corpse of Osama bin Laden through the minds of prospective Democratic voters, as Achilles dragged the lifeless body of Hector through the streets of Troy. But the American President shall not fool the voter with a healthy memory. President George W. Bush put boots on the ground of Afghanistan in 2001, NATO and US Special Forces in Pakistan, shortly thereafter.

President Obama''s gallivanting throughout the Middle East upon his 2008 victory over Republican candidate John McCain, shaking the hand of sheiks and mullahs did nothing to display his foreign policy, any more than the recent departure of all American forces from Iraq. Where despite widespread denial of there ever having been weapons of mass destruction in the caches of the wicked Hussein regime, it was revealed Saddam Hussein had used lethal gas to exterminate a large portion of that country''s Kurdish population.

On November 13, 2004, my high school friend, Corporal Kevin Jack Dempsey, was laid to rest. He was killed by insurgents in Anbar province. Despite popular resistance among my generation to the war effort in Iraq, I never doubted Corporal Dempsey''s integrity nor for that matter, that of the country for which he fought.

Recently, some 63 people were killed and 185 wounded in Baghdad, immediately following the Obama-helmed troop departure. It was the Iraqi capitol''s deadliest day in over a year.  So much for democracy; so much for humanitarianism or peace in the region.

As Iraq stands on the cusp of falling into civil war, that is, racial, sectarian, Sunni verse Shi''ite bloodshed; the American troop departure does little to solve any problem for the United States. Nor, I may add, did the no-fly-zone/NATO bomb campaign on Libya assist American interests in anyway, where after a vicious civil war, Gadaffi – may his legacy perish – was finally defeated by – surprise, surprise – the hand of the Libyans of the uprising.

So if humanitarianism in the Arab world is the great concern of President Obama, where oh where are NATO forces when the bloodshed in the nearly oil-depleted Syria, continues to grow after a year?

Leftist causes continue to point the finger at Israel and the United States military as being the aggressors in the region except of course when it comes to Libya where the US military intervention cost American taxpayers upwards of $896 million, even in these days of fiscal malaise.

If anyone is lacking in any kind of socio-political pragmatism in the Middle East and disregard for human suffering it is indeed President Obama, whose foreign policy, devoid of any kind of logic, uses innocent lives in the Arab World as nothing more than a campaign tool.

Meanwhile, President Obama insists that the United States will not send troops back to Iraq. On Dec. 14, at Fort Bragg in N.C., the American President told US troops who were returning that he had "left Iraq in the hands of the Iraqi people," and according to the American press, in private conversations in Washington, he told aides that the United States has "given Iraqis an opportunity; what they do with that opportunity is up to them."

A rather careless attitude for a humanitarian President who just spent nearly one billion dollars of US tax payer money funding a civil war in Libya, where al Qaida, the great enemy in Iraq, now flies their iconic black flag over a public building in Benghazi.