Tonight's Political Comment

Barack Obama's speech this evening doesn't seem to have pleased anyone. Pro-Obama folks thought it was wishy-washy and unfocused. Anti-Obama folks don't like anything he does. Fred Kaplan sums up some of the things wrong with it.

But at least the Iraq War is over…sort of. Was anyone happy with that whole thing? Can anyone explain what we accomplished that was worth all those lives and resources? I mean, apart from stopping Saddam Hussein from using those Weapons of Mass Destruction? Some reporter with Nexis access oughta dig up all those jokes and comments that once dotted the press and Internet about how weapons inspectors like Hans Blix had to be deaf, dumb, blind and bribed not to have found solid evidence of them because even the stupidest person in the world knew that Saddam had 'em. Did you see anyone ever apologize to Mr. Blix and his fellow inspectors? I didn't.

Earlier today on CNN, I saw two people (no one famous) saying that it was too soon to withdraw troops. One was some guy at a truck stop, whose rhetoric was not unlike John McCain's. Someone once summarized McCain's Iraq strategy as: "We stay until there's absolutely no reason for us to stay…and then we continue to stay." I thought that was an unfair exaggeration until I heard a McCain speech that said pretty much that.

The other person was a very sad lady whose son died in Iraq. Her argument was that if we leave now, her son and all the other fallen soldiers will have died in vain. So we owe it to them to stay (i.e., get more soldiers killed) until we accomplish something — anything! — that justifies her loss. That's a sad argument for any war. If some demented leader sent our troops to fight a war that everyone thought was pointless and unwinnable, you could still use that argument as a reason to keep it going. And someone would.