Merry Christmas, US Troops Back From Iraq

I hope you're enjoying the day with your family and loved ones, we appreciate your service, and most of all we're glad you're home.

Jennifer Rubin, of course, is not.

President Obama missed the boat on tax reform. He put politics above entitlement reform. He worsened already-tense relations with Israel. But the worst error, in large part because it was both avoidable and is not irreversible, was to pull all troops out of Iraq.

I'll just go ahead and remind her that over three-quarters of Americans think Rubin's full of crap and that they back President Obama's decision, 78-21%. The same margin believes there is nothing more we can accomplish by keeping troops in Iraq right now.  Half of us believe our actions in Iraq were not morally justified.  Over half believe the war in Iraq has a negative effect on the country.  Over half believe sending troops to Iraq in the first place was a mistake.

Rubin goes on to say that General Petraeus should resign in protest and that America's reputation has been destroyed forever, and that President Obama could never accept that Bush was right.  It's laughable, because tens of million of Americans wanted us out of Iraq just for President Obama's political optics, and she's acting like we all forgot the fact we "found" those Iraqi WMD the first day we were there.

Rubin really is the worst columnist in America.  What she fails to realize is that the American people long ago made the decision that the Iraq War was over.  We no longer have the consent of the governed in order to prosecute it.  Most importantly, it was President Bush who said that we were leaving Iraq at the end of 2011...and the Iraqi government who made it clear that President Obama had no choice but to honor the agreement when the time came.

Keeping troops in Iraq would have amounted to a second invasion, pure and simple.  The Iraqis threw us outa,d only by honoring that deal...and President Obama making it painfully clear that we would honor the deal...were the security gains in Iraq that we made in the last couple years even possible.  It was possible because they knew Bush would never have honored the deal if he was still in charge at the time, and that the Iraqis knew that Obama, when the time came, would make the right decision.

What moral, international, or democratically-granted authority Rubin thinks we have for keeping an invasion force in Iraq against the will of the Iraqi government, I have no clue.  We had no choice but to leave on several different levels.

The war ended.  Our troops are home.  Deal with it.  And enjoy being home, folks.  You've earned it.