Obama win sparks global conversation on Iraq and Afghanistan

News that Barack Obama is the president-elect of the United States has already sparked a global conversation about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how American foreign policy will shift in the coming months...US troops will be pulled out of Iraq in the next 16 months, while the American force in Afghanistan will be substantially reinforced, reversing what is widely seen as one of the fundamental strategic blunders of the Bush era.

The US military effort is to be focused once more on al-Qaida and its allies. Obama has vowed that if necessary, American forces would, as under the Bush administration, cross the Pakistan border in pursuit of al-Qaida targets...The Obama win may also bring a spike in violence in Iraq, reports The Guardian. Getting out of Iraq will be all the more imperative because a financially weakened America can no longer afford to stay, but it will be far from easy. Robert Kaplan, an author and strategic analyst at the Centre for a New American Security in Washington, warns that the insurgents and the Iranian government will seek to ensure an American withdrawal is a humiliating one.

The Iraqis should have long ago known that if Obama was elected, they should refuse to sign the Status Of Forces Agreement, so that the US military will have to leave Iraq by the end of the year when the UN authorization expires.

The purpose for this is so that Obama will be incapable of encouraging Iran to destabilize Iraq, resulting in widespread bloodshed and carnage, and Iran dominating Iraq as an inferior client state. Do not for a moment assume he would not do this. Iraq, to Obama, is an enemy he has always wanted to destroy since the US invasion.

If the US military, another Obama enemy, is out of Iraq by Inauguration Day, they cannot be used as a pawn in this matter. They will, however, leave the Iraqis with a shopping list of arms and equipment they must obtain immediately to insure that they are protected from Iran. Iraq currently has many billions of dollars available to them for such purchases.

In any event, Obama intends to radically slash military spending, leaving the US military incapable of force projection against a dedicated enemy.

If there was any possible way for the US military to permanently leave Afghanistan right now, they should do so as well. Unfortunately, it is much similar to Vietnam, with Laos and Cambodia, in that half its border is shared with Pakistan, which has a seemingly endless number of fighters to send to Afghanistan to stir up trouble.

This is just the situation that president Johnson found South Vietnam, and with the help of a Democrat congress, turned it into a horrific bloodbath, culminating with a humiliating withdrawl and abandonment of an ally.

Since that time, Jimmy Carter abandoned five nations to tyranny, including two close allies, and Bill Clinton was unable to do so solely because none of our allies were threatened during his time.

With a growing Russian and Chinese threat, Obama may be left with the choice to abandon Iraq, Afghanistan, Taiwan, central Asia, and even eastern Europe.

Is there any doubt he would do so? Likely that he would *want* to do so, because he despises them all?

A close friend of mine works for a defense contractor involved in Iraq. He deals, on a day-to-day basis, with Iraqi government officials and soldiers. The e-mails he has been getting since the election from his Iraqi colleagues and friends are uniformly negative about the election results. In many cases, these are people who have risked their lives, and their family's live, to fight the terrorists who are trying to overthrow their democratic government. But now, they are demoralized because they fear that Hussein will cut and run and leave them to fend for themselves, like we did with the South Vietnamese.

I'm sure this election has made artists in Paris and waiters in Spain happy. But for our allies who are on the front-line in the war against Islamic terrorism, there is not much to cheer about today.

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