Axis Of What?

Jennifer Rubin makes a statement today in the Washington Post that is perhaps the silliest and most asinine thing that I have ever seen printed in any medium. A comic book would balk at printing this, even as satire.

There is no better example of the trouble wrought by President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s policy of retreat and retrenchment than the sight of Secretary of State John Kerry pleading with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to stop arming the Iranian axis.

First, she’s going to have to tell me what the hell the “Iranian axis” is. Is it something along the lines of George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” perhaps? If so, one can assume that Syria is a member, but two countries don’t constitute an “axis,” so who else belongs to it? And do we really need a renewal of Bush rhetoric at this point?

The “policy of retreat and retrenchment” presumably refers to “bugging out,” as the headline puts it, from Iraq, but she casually overlooks that the agreement that resulted in that move was made between al-Maliki and George Bush, not by Obama. Of course Obama and his administration rather muddy that issue by making statements that imply that it was Obama who “ended the war in Iraq,” so she’s not making that one up out of whole cloth, but that doesn’t mean that she’s making any sense.

As if she had not displayed enough ignorance already by claiming that it was Obama who could not “figure out how to leave a stabilizing force in Iraq” after Bush accepted al-Maliki’s dictate that we would not be allowed to do so, she then claims that failing to do so “frittered away the gains made by the surge” and wasted some imaginary negotiations made by Crocker that supposedly negated the agreement between Bush and al-Maliki.

Then, adding insanity to ignorance, she compares our presence in Iraq to our postwar occupation of Germany, which is much like comparing strawberry farming to concrete street paving.

I actually had noted Kerry making demands that Iraq not only deny airspace to Iran, but that they also conduct their elections in a manner befitting American principles. I had intended to comment on the fecklessness of America making such demands of a country which had just thrown us out after ten years of hostile military occupation, but it is certain that I make that criticism from a different viewpoint than does Jennifer Rubin.

Rubin still doesn’t realize that we are living with the results of the disastrous blunder of invading Iraq in the first place. Obama doesn’t realize just what that blunder cost us; acts as if it didn't cost us anything.