Frank Rich: Obama's "tone deaf" end to combat operations in Iraq

[derby378]

What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose “end” he was marking. That legacy of anger and grief is what “Freedom” mainlines to its readers. In chronicling one Midwestern family as it migrates from St. Paul to Washington during the 9/11 decade, Franzen does for our traumatic time what Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” did for the cartoonish go-go 1980s. Or perhaps, more pertinently, what “The Great Gatsby” did for the ominous boom of the 1920s. The heady intoxication of freedom is everywhere in “Freedom,” from extramarital sexual couplings to the consumer nirvana of the iPod to Operation Iraqi Freedom itself. Yet most everyone, regardless of age or calling or politics, is at war — not with terrorists, but with depression, with their consciences and with one another.

This mood has not lifted and may be thickening as we trudge toward Year 10 in Afghanistan. But Obama only paid it lip service. It’s a mystery why a candidate so attuned to the nation’s pulse, most especially on the matter of war, has grown tone deaf in office. On Tuesday, Obama asked the country to turn the page on Iraq as if that were as easy as, say, voting for him in 2008. His brief rhetorical pivot from the war to the economy only raised the question of why the crisis of joblessness has not merited a prime-time Oval Office speech of its own.

That Obama did consider Iraq worthy of that distinction — one heretofore shared only by the BP oil spill — was hardly justified by his tepid pronouncements of progress (“credible elections that drew a strong turnout”) or his tidy homilies about the war’s impact. “Our unity at home was tested,” he said, as if all those bygones were now bygones and all the toxins unleashed by this fiasco had miraculously evaporated once we drew down to 50,000 theoretically non-combat troops.

Americans are less forgiving. In recent polls, 60 percent of those surveyed thought the war in Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent thought it wasn’t worth American lives, and only a quarter believed it made us safer from terrorism. This sour judgment is entirely reality-based. The war failed in all its stated missions except the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05rich.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&th&emc=th

[jaxx]

1. Rich sounds like he's sorry it's over.

Or maybe he's just pining for the old dubya days of drama.

[derby378]

2. When the last troops have left Iraq, it'll be over

And it does sound like there's a little whitewashing going on about the whole occupation to begin with.

[jaxx]

3. Which of the 7.5 years are you talking about?

[derby378]

4. 7.5 years and counting... (n/t)

[jaxx]

6. I'd laugh but you'd think getting out would be worth something.

Instead we get the conspiracy crap. No sale.

[asjr]

5. Exactly! Eight years of sheer terror

under Dumbya and Rich wants all of it corrected in less than 1 year. I think he just likes the sound of his own pompous voice.

[paulk]

8. bullshit

once again - instead of attacking the messenger, which in your case is anyone who doesn't think the sun shines out of Obama's ass - why don't you address the substance of Rich's column?

Can you even do that?

Because all I see from you on this board is endless repetition of the company line and personal attacks on any and all columnists who don't follow that line 100%.

[jaxx]

9. He wrote it, he can take the heat.

It's an op-ed. My opinion is that the article was lean on facts and heavy on rhetoric.

[paulk]

10. that's not "heat"

you're just trashing him.

Point out the facts he's "lean" on.

Point out where his rhetoric goes overboard.

[Smarmie Doofus]

7. Can we suspend the rules to allow for more than one Rec? nt