In the past four days the world has seen the end of Muammar Gaddafi and an official declaration that the U.S. will pull all troops out of Iraq in a little over two months. Taken together, even a hardened skeptic has to admit that it continues a series of successes that President Obama has had overseas, even if they weren't all of his design.
But not in land of the Republicans and conservatives.
Libya? The U.S. should have gotten in sooner, the critics claim, ignoring that much of this country was split on whether the U.S. military should have gotten involved at all last spring.
And Iraq? The fact is that President Bush signed a Status of Forces Agreement back in 2008 with the Iraqi government that declared that all U.S. troops would be out of that nation by December 31, 2008. The withdrawal is also something that the American public overwhelmingly supports, and, oh yeah, the Iraqi government? They don't want us there, not enough to give legal immunity to our remaining soldiers.
But that apparently means nothing to Obama's foreign policy critics, who now say he has given a gift to neighboring Iran. Check out Rick Santorum on Face The Nation, essentially saying the U.S. "lost" the war in Iraq:
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2011.