From President Obama's State of the Union address last night:
As we take the fight to al Qaeda, we are responsibly leaving Iraq to its people. As a candidate, I promised that I would end this war, and that is what I am doing as president. We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August. We will support the Iraqi government as they hold elections, and continue to partner with the Iraqi people to promote regional peace and prosperity. But make no mistake: this war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.
Would it have been too much for the president of the United States to have acknowledged and paid tribute to a truly remarkable recent American achievement -- turning around the war in Iraq and putting that war on course to a successful outcome?
Yes it would be too much, for one simple reason: any US military combat victory acknowledged as such by this very Leftist of presidents would contradict a specific narrative.
This military has been portrayed as villainous or full of victims; its enlisted personnel have been characterized as uneducated hayseed/ghetto dupes and its commissioned officers as brutal overseers (purposely) leading those dupes to pointless slaughter like pigs. (To be fair, however, President Obama is not this narrative's most full-voiced champion, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D-NV] holds that title.)
This Leftist president cannot bring himself to go against that narrative, and it's doubtful that any concepts indicating combat success by the US military even occurred to him Such concepts are an anathema to the kind of ideologue that the president is. He can only speak of endings.
Mercifully, he was cunning enough to speak of that ending in neutral terms. But we know the truth.
(Thanks to Hot Air)
