By Peter Galuszka
You can say what you want about embattled President Barack Obama, but the fact is that he’s had a number of foreign policy successes.
Here are a few:
- After years of failure, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was finally surrounded and killed by U.S. special forces — something the Bush Administration failed to do for seven years.
- Despite Republican complaints, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed a thoughtful and patient course that supported insurgents in Libya and select NATO airstrikes. Now Muamar al-Gaddafi, a brutal dictator who has been a thorn in the side for four decades, is dead and Libya holds the promise of transforming into a modern democracy.
- The U.S. did not stand in the way of the twitter movements in other countries such as Tunisia and Egypt.
- The heavy-handed, arrogant policies and personalities of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney made Washington a pariah amongst its traditional allies. Obama and Clinton have changed that.
- As announced today, Obama will return U.S. troops in Iraq home by the end of the year. Some 4,400 of them were killed along with 100,000 civilians in a war that was not necessary since no Weapons of Mass Destruction were ever found and the Bush Administration lied about evidence that they existed.
- Greatly reducing U.S. presence in Iraq will greatly alleviate budget and spending pressure — something conservatives are loath to admit when it involves Bush’s wars.
To give credit where due, George W. Bush did turn things around in Iraq with “The Surge.” And Obama’s had a very rough time on the economic front in part because of his lack of experience and also because of the utter lack of cooperation from the likes of John Boehner and Eric Cantor. But his foreign policy successes cannot be denied no matter how hard the conservatives may try to twist facts and perceptions.
