Christian Brose: Obama should have thanked Bush for the surge.

Stop bitterly laughing like that.  You’ll scare the kids.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) This is in the context of mentioning President Obama’s recent military speech, and in the context of discussing the fairly obvious – to people with functioning neural tissue, at least – points that the President is coasting on Bush’s successful surge strategy; and that our failure to actually have an ambassador to Iraq at the moment is, put simply, dumb. With that out of the way, Brose went on to ask the President to at least note the victories of the previous administration. Brose did not also ask for a magical elixir that would cure cancer, warts, and the galloping staggers, although I’m not sure why. He didn’t stand that much less of chance of getting it (bolding mine):

5. At the risk of heading into la-la land, I think Obama should have tipped his hat ever so slightly today to President Bush, Sen. McCain, and other Republicans who had supported the surge strategy, naming them and thanking them. Of course, there’s no telling how Iraq would look today had the surge never happened, but it’s likely that conditions would be pretty grim and that this withdrawal plan would have the smell of defeat to it, rather than the opposite, as it does.

Obama could have caveated this to death — “I opposed Bush’s decision to begin this war, I opposed how he sold it to America, I opposed the way he prosecuted it,” etc. But he could have recognized that Bush’s decision to change strategies in 2007 is in large part why the security situation in Iraq has turned around more than anyone could have hoped, why we can now begin drawing down our forces with a good measure of confidence, and why our troops now feel more and more that their sacrifice is worth it.

Not only would this have been magnanimous, it would have been smart politics. It would have acknowledged the bipartisanship that underlies the decision to begin bringing our troops home by drawing an important line of continuity through our Iraq efforts of the past two years. It would have disarmed Obama’s more hawkish critics on Iraq by conceding their point on the surge and turning it into an argument for the drawdown, which it is. And it would have shown Republicans that Obama is committed not just to a bipartisanship of style but of substance — not just being willing to recognize when the other side has valid points, but actually incorporating them into one’s own thinking.

He’s not.

(pause)

And that’s pretty much it.

Moe Lane

Crossposted at RedState.