From the August 8, 2010 CSI Walworth County Sunday "The Way we see it" column:

This week’s gold medal for political gall goes to a repeat winner — the commander-in-chief himself, who continues to be deeply impressed by his ability to spearhead the Big Win in Iraq.

Sounding a bit like his warmongering predecessor — although we’re sure that Mr. Bush knows the “p” in “corpsman” is silent — President Obama declared mission accomplished in Iraq Monday in a speech at the Disabled American Veterans national convention in Atlanta.

“Shortly after taking office, I announced our new strategy for Iraq and for a transition to full Iraqi responsibility,” he said. “And I made it clear that by Aug. 31, 2010, America’s combat mission in Iraq would end. And that is exactly what we are doing, as promised, on schedule.”

In truth, what Obama did is ignore just about everything he’s ever said about the war in Iraq — including everything similarly said by his vice president, his secretary of state and the Senate majority leader — while simultaneously carrying out an agreement reached by the Bush administration that established a timetable for withdrawal of combat troops.

Then again, it’s difficult to credit Bush for pursuing a successful surge strategy in Iraq when you’re busy blaming him daily for everything from the recession to the lack of foie gras in the green room of “The View.”

For those with conveniently short memories, we offer the following quotes from Obama and his minions regarding the war in Iraq:

• “We have set the bar so low that modest improvement — in what was a completely chaotic situation to the point where now we just have the levels of intolerable violence that existed in June of 2006 — is considered a success. And it’s not,” Obama, unburdened by leadership in 2007, then told Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was such a miserable failure in Iraq that he since has been tabbed by the president to implement a surge strategy in Afghanistan.
• “In continuing the surge of forces for another six months, is that likely to change that reality?” asked then-Sen. Joe Biden, who famously called for Iraq to be forcibly partitioned into three states based on ethnicity. “The conclusion I’ve reached is, no.”

Later in September 2007, the vice president insisted that Petraeus is “dead wrong.”

"If we do not change course in Iraq soon,” Biden said about the surge strategy, “you’re going to see, two years from now, helicopters hovering over our embassy in the Green Zone in Baghdad with people hanging (on to) the ladders just like Vietnam. Mark my words.”

• “Despite what I view as your rather extraordinary efforts in both your testimony yesterday and today, I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief,” then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, now the secretary of state, said to Petraeus in September 2007, when the general was called to Congress to defend his surge strategy.
• “... this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid famously said in April 2007.

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Sanctimonious Democrats now celebrate the military and political gains made in Iraq, as they should. Their new-found patriotism certainly is more attractive than the interminable — and damaging — caterwauling that characterized their time as the wartime opposition party.

Perhaps the proud president will one day manage to concede that he inherited a war on the verge of being won — and with an exit strategy in place. This will go down a lot harder than bruschetta and foie gras, but it is, nonetheless, the truth.

Read more on the Outlook and Perspective pages of CSI's Walworth County Sunday e-edition on pages 8A and 9A. and add your comments below.

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