President Barack Obama signs a banner hanging in a room while visiting with Wounded Warriors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Aug. 30, 2010. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Biden says Iraq’s going to be just fine, but is it?

Vice President Joe Biden is in Iraq this week, marking the formal end to America’s combat mission – 50,000 troops remain, rebranded as an “advise and assist” mission – in the now dictator-free country.  The President addresses the nation Tuesday night from Fort Bliss in Texas, using a primetime speech to salute the troops and, as USA Today reported, to try “to convince a skeptical public that a war he didn’t start and didn’t support ended as well as it could have on his watch.”

The White House has signaled that it will not be repeating President George Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” gaffe – in 2003, the then President appeared before a banner reading those words, claiming that major combat operations were done in Iraq. What Obama will do, however, is use this speech to talk about the other war, the one in Afghanistan. In a leading editorial published at the weekend, The New York Times noted, “Americans are increasingly skeptical, indeed despairing, about that war. The president needs to do much more to explain the stakes and his strategy.”

Obama salutes the troops:

However, while America will no doubt be expending more energy on curbing the insurgency in Afghanistan, The Times urged the President to remind Americans of the continued commitment in Iraq: “Mr. Obama also needs to talk about Iraq and remind Americans that after seven years of fighting, this country still has a responsibility and a strategic interest in helping Iraq succeed. The Washington bureaucracy, which we fear is moving on, needs to hear that message loud and clear. So do Iraqis.”

Indeed, the Iraq mission is far from accomplished, pundits and observers claim. The departing commander of American combat forcesin Iraq, General Ray Odierno, told The New York Times’s veteran reporter Anthony Shadid that Iraqi politicians need an additional six to eight weeks to form a government and that should this stalemate continue, another election may be required. And he’s worried. As Shadid reported, “The prospect of another election would probably throw Iraq’s already turbulent politics into even greater turmoil as the United States begins withdrawing its last 50,000 troops, scheduled to be out by the end of 2011. While the election in March was viewed as successful, the periods before and after included bitter disputes over disqualifications, recounts, legal challenges and score-settling that exacerbated still smoldering sectarian tensions.” Americans are leaving Iraq without a functioning government in place, and certainly not one capable of delivering basic needs – a dangerous situation sowing deep the seeds of anger in the Iraqi people.

And former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi – who has his own political motivations – told German magazine Der Spiegel, “Today, we are further than ever from national reconciliation. The ethnic-confessional cleansings continue, especially in central Iraq and Baghdad. The exodus and expulsions of Iraqis has taken on a dimension not seen since the founding of modern Iraq in the 1920s.”

However, some pundits claim that if America’s intention in Iraq was nation building, then it worked. David Brooks, writing at The New York Times, declared that there are “signs of progress” of the Iraqi economic front, boasting the 12th fastest-growing economy in the world this year; living standards and basic services are improving, and though he noted that the current stalemate festering at the top level of government could imperil the whole, “[p]olitically, the basic structure is sound.”

“After the disaster of the first few years, nation building, much derided, has been a success,” Brooks wrote. “When President Obama speaks to the country on Iraq, he’ll be able to point to a large national project that has contributed to measurable, positive results.” Obama, now, must balance pride with caution.

And that seems to be the general feeling of the commentariat at large: Caution. Paul Wolfowitz, former secretary of defense also writing in The New York Times, pointed to America’s involvement in South Korea following the end of the bloody Korean War in 1953 as a model for how the US should proceed in Iraq: “It is well worth celebrating the end of combat operations after seven years, and the homecoming of so many troops. But fully abandoning Iraq would damage the interests of the United States in the region and beyond.”