Politics and Culture

For a smart guy, Sen. Obama says the most banal things. But, I bet he loves the sound his voice makes when espousing them:

Democrat Barack Obama said Tuesday the recent increase in American troops in Iraq may well have helped tamp down violence, but he insisted there is no military solution to the country's problems and U.S. forces should be redeployed soon.

Obama spoke a day after his main Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, made similar comments. She said the tactics of the short-term troop increase were working but political progress did not seem to be in sight and the U.S. should begin bringing some troops home.

Obama said in a telephone briefing, "If we put 30,000 additional troops into Baghdad, it will quell some of the violence short term. I don't think there is any doubt about that."

But that won't solve Iraq's critical political problems, he said in the call and again later in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

"All of our top military commanders recognize that there is no military solution in Iraq," Obama said at the VFW convention in Kansas City. "No military surge can succeed without political reconciliation and a surge of diplomacy in Iraq and the region. Iraq's leaders are not reconciling. They are not achieving political benchmarks. The only thing they seem to have agreed on is to take a vacation."

Obama's right, but I wonder who he's arguing with? Nobody says that the only solution to Iraq is defeating the enemy militarily. Just like the crime problem in Los Angeles won't improve unless the culture within the most dangerous neighborhoods changes, Iraq won't become peaceful until Iraqis desire to live in peace more than they hate their rivals, or, God willing, they actually start loving their neighbors.

To keep with the same analogy: we need to keep violently fighting the enemy in Iraq to kill evildoers and grant Iraq a chance to reform, as tough policing at home prevents crime and gives the good people an opportunity to make available a safe education, build businesses, and do everything else that follows the security prerequisite.

Without an organized defense, civilized people in both locales must resort to the tactics of their enemies.

Politically, the admission that the surge is quelling violence is very significant. It may be making some Dems. nervous.