Who Runs Gov

A few quick notes on President Obama’s speech laying out his plans for withdrawal from Iraq.

First, Obama projected a strong sense that he was genuinely addressing the rest of the world. When Obama took a moment to “speak directly to the people of Iraq,” and by extension to the region and the world, and assured his international audience of our good intentions, his speech didn’t have any whiff of being intended for a domestic audience, as his predecessor’s speeches so often did.

This is in keeping with Obama’s posture during the campaign. His famous Berlin speech, for instance, while obviously intended to persuade American audiences that he was comfortable on the world stage, and while laced with tough talk about terrorism, did have a feel of a genuine apology to the rest of the world for America’s conduct during the previous eight years. Obama’s speech today represented his first concrete policy follow-through on his promise of a new American internationalism.

Second, and relatedly, Obama’s speech today contained what has become a key component of his message: He conceded that the need to withdraw from Iraq was rooted in the undeniable reality that there are limits to what American military might can accomplish. That was the subtext of the speech’s acknowledgment that “we cannot police Iraq’s streets until they are completely safe, nor stay until Iraq’s union is perfected.” This message constitutes genuine foreign policy realism, and it’s a concession many Democrats have shied away from making in such stark terms.

While there’s a great deal more to be said about the specifics of his policy — the large residual force, the pushed back end-date — it seems to me that the sight of a President who won the election on an anti-war, internationalist platform delivering these broad messages to an audience of applauding troops dramatizes as clean a break from the past as one could possibly ask for.

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