US President Barack Obama
Barack Obama's stagecraft was starkly different - he used a speech before disabled veterans instead of landing on an aircraft carrier in full flight gear - but it still amounted to his own "Mission Accomplished" moment.
"As a candidate for president, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end. … And that is exactly what we are doing - as promised and on schedule," Mr. Obama noted in a speech on Monday to mark the formal completion of the combat mission in Iraq and the withdrawal of all but 50,000 U.S. troops from the still unsettled nation.
Unlike George W. Bush's brash and ultimately premature 2003 declaration of success in Iraq, Mr. Obama's self-congratulations are unlikely to come back to haunt him in the same embarrassing way.
But even as this President reaps the rewards of the troop surge in Iraq that his predecessor enacted and he opposed, the reality is that his administration remains every bit as entangled in a financially draining and politically perilous foreign conflict as the last one.
The end of the nearly $800-billion U.S. combat mission in Iraq by month's end coincides almost exactly with the arrival of the last of the 30,000 additional American troops the President is sending to Afghanistan. While Mr. Obama has withdrawn more than 90,000 troops from Iraq, he has tripled the U.S. contingent in Afghanistan to almost 100,000 soldiers.
The Dutch government's weekend move to withdraw its 1,950 troops from Afghanistan and the end of Canada's combat mission there next year means more of the burden of fighting the Taliban will fall to U.S. soldiers. As a result, Mr. Obama may have a hard time meeting his own deadline to begin withdrawing U.S. troops by next July.
But persuading Democrats that he remains committed to extricating the country from the Afghan conflict would have been harder had he been unable to make good on his Iraq pledge. The President has already disappointed liberal Democrats by altering his Iraq strategy somewhat since his election. Instead of withdrawing all U.S. troops by this month, as he promised during the campaign, Mr. Obama agreed to postpone the final pullout until Dec. 31, 2011, the date set by the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush administration.
Until then, the remaining U.S. troops in Iraq will be mostly involved in training and advising the Iraqi security forces. And although some could still be drawn into deadly counterterrorism operations, the Obama administration is changing the name of the mission from Operation Iraqi Freedom to Operation New Dawn.
"It was a speech given for domestic political purposes rather than to announce some key shift in U.S. policy in Iraq," Brian Burton, Bacevich Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, explained in an interview. "It particularly is directed at the Democratic base in advance of the midterm elections. He's telling them, 'I'm getting it done.'"
Iraq's ongoing failure to form a new government almost five months after the March parliamentary elections has raised the prospect of a prolonged period of political instability that, in the worst case, could even degenerate into a period of renewed civil war.
Still, there is little chance that Mr. Obama will ever have to amend Monday's "mission accomplished" declaration before a convention of Disabled American Veterans in Atlanta.
"If things go really badly, can you really imagine us going back in there in force?" Mr. Burton noted. Besides, he added, "it has been striking how things have actually held together somehow in spite of this crisis of governance in Iraq."
In contrast, the situation in Afghanistan - where more U.S. troops died in July than during any month of the nearly nine-year conflict - will continue to bedevil Mr. Obama, as much politically as militarily.
"I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars," Mr. Obama stated in 2002, when he spoke against a U.S. invasion to topple Saddam Hussein and attacked "the cynical attempt" by "the weekend warriors in [the Bush] administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."
Convincing his own supporters that there are substantive differences between Mr. Bush's goals in Iraq and his own in Afghanistan will be challenging. In recent days, the administration has stepped up its efforts to do so, at least in part to rally a leery Democratic base in time for the Nov. 2 midterm elections, when the party's majorities in Congress will be tested.
Last week, Mr. Obama told CBS News that he had "a fairly modest goal" in Afghanistan: "Don't allow terrorists to operate from this region." On Monday, he referred to "goals that are clear and achievable." The message, at least, is that the all-encompassing counterinsurgency strategy believed to be at the heart of the troop surge is really a more targeted counterterrorism effort.
The change in tone is partly aimed at reassuring Democrats, including some of the 102 in the House of Representatives who last week voted against providing additional war funding, that he is not making an open-ended military commitment.
Still, the more than $300-billion Afghanistan war tally is certain to balloon in coming months as the full complement of U.S. troops arrives. Mr. Obama pledged on Monday that efforts to reduce the $1.45-trillion deficit would not affect spending "to keep our military strong."
By ending one war on time, the President is hoping to buy enough goodwill from his own Democrats to allow him to wage another.
Konrad Yakabuski