I'm sure the last thing he wanted to do was sound cavalier, but President Barack Obama's "turn the page" speech had the decided ring of "put it all behind me and move on," the standard statement by sports stars who've just lawyered their way out of doing jail time for assault.
It's not just that the Iraq we broke is a long, long way from running on its own, much less operating the Western democracy our own Sen. Richard Lugar berates Obama for failing to export.
It's the breezy refusal, in the face of a world that knows better, to acknowledge the victimhood of a people we were wrong to attack and wrong before that to subject to 13 years of economic embargo.
For his own reasons, practical as well as political, Obama chose to cite the sacrifices American GIs made for a counterfeit cause he himself did not support (initially, at least, before the funding bills). He conspicuously failed to mention that Iraqi deaths exceeded ours by a very conservatively estimated 25 to 1 in an invasion and occupation fabricated on the bogus pretext of 9/11 complicity and weapons of mass destruction.
While Republicans groused that George W. Bush's surge wasn't given credit for this page-turning opportunity, Democrats could only pray their man came across as a competent commander who would nudge the mayhem in Iraq and Afghanistan out of the sight and mind of the majority; i.e., those without family over there.
The president of 2010 may have pleased, at best, only the latter, even as he praised Bush's love of country. The Barack Obama of Grant Park and Cairo, of tearing down walls and meeting all nations as equals, would have settled for neither. That Obama of yesterday, of course, wasn't faced with a Greek chorus of rabid Republican enemies and rabbity Democrats.
It's the economy, stupid, the one that's never been burdened by a tax to pay for these trillion-dollar-and-counting wars that America is supposed to have sacrificed for. No tax, no draft, and certainly in the case of the war we're turning the page on, no justification.
What the president knew and would not or could not say is that Iraq was so devastated by the 1991 Gulf War and the years of Western-enforced poverty that followed, it was laughable to depict it as an international threat. This war was one of choice, our choice; and men, women and children with absolutely no choice got swept along in the blood tide. Their hundreds of thousands of deaths from violence, illness and malnutrition over the 20 years are to be seen as fair price for removal of a dictator, and we turn the page of the ledger book with the understanding they are the debtor in this deal they did not strike.
"We don't feel the sorrow of war," the peace activist Kathy Kelly, who risked her life bringing medicine and food into Iraq during the sanctions, told an Indianapolis audience recently. If we wait for our leaders to help us study the back pages, we never will feel it.
It's not just that the Iraq we broke is a long, long way from running on its own, much less operating the Western democracy our own Sen. Richard Lugar berates Obama for failing to export.
It's the breezy refusal, in the face of a world that knows better, to acknowledge the victimhood of a people we were wrong to attack and wrong before that to subject to 13 years of economic embargo.
For his own reasons, practical as well as political, Obama chose to cite the sacrifices American GIs made for a counterfeit cause he himself did not support (initially, at least, before the funding bills). He conspicuously failed to mention that Iraqi deaths exceeded ours by a very conservatively estimated 25 to 1 in an invasion and occupation fabricated on the bogus pretext of 9/11 complicity and weapons of mass destruction.
While Republicans groused that George W. Bush's surge wasn't given credit for this page-turning opportunity, Democrats could only pray their man came across as a competent commander who would nudge the mayhem in Iraq and Afghanistan out of the sight and mind of the majority; i.e., those without family over there.
The president of 2010 may have pleased, at best, only the latter, even as he praised Bush's love of country. The Barack Obama of Grant Park and Cairo, of tearing down walls and meeting all nations as equals, would have settled for neither. That Obama of yesterday, of course, wasn't faced with a Greek chorus of rabid Republican enemies and rabbity Democrats.
It's the economy, stupid, the one that's never been burdened by a tax to pay for these trillion-dollar-and-counting wars that America is supposed to have sacrificed for. No tax, no draft, and certainly in the case of the war we're turning the page on, no justification.
What the president knew and would not or could not say is that Iraq was so devastated by the 1991 Gulf War and the years of Western-enforced poverty that followed, it was laughable to depict it as an international threat. This war was one of choice, our choice; and men, women and children with absolutely no choice got swept along in the blood tide. Their hundreds of thousands of deaths from violence, illness and malnutrition over the 20 years are to be seen as fair price for removal of a dictator, and we turn the page of the ledger book with the understanding they are the debtor in this deal they did not strike.
"We don't feel the sorrow of war," the peace activist Kathy Kelly, who risked her life bringing medicine and food into Iraq during the sanctions, told an Indianapolis audience recently. If we wait for our leaders to help us study the back pages, we never will feel it.