John Boehner released a gloating Iraq war video in advance of President Obama's Oval Office address on the drawdown of combat troops in Iraq.
The youngest U.S. soldiers in Iraq today were ten or eleven years old when the Bush administration told the country that the invasion, launched on false premises, would be a "cakewalk," yet today the GOP considers itself to have been on the right side of history.
The video begins with Boehner, the House Minority Leader, asking the question: "Who doesn't believe that if we withdraw and leave that chaos in the Middle East that the terrorists won't follow us here to the United States?"
But chaos abounds. On Wednesday, at least 50 people were killed across Iraq in coordinated shootings, car bombing and IED attacks. "The situation doesn't let us live our lives here," Mahmoud Hussein, 26, told a reporter. "No water, no electricity, no security. Every day it gets worse."
The country is in political chaos, too. Six months after elections, competing factions have been unable to form a government, leaving a power vacuum.
By Boehner's reasoning, then, the terrorists in Iraq will be following combat troops home to the United States any day.
In reality, violence declined in Iraq largely due to a complex interplay of forces. Most strategists point to the Sunni Awakening, the decision by a large swath of insurgents to turn against Al Qaeda and fight on the side of the United States, as the turning point in the war, yet it is given only passing mention in Boehner's video. The Awakening came months before the surge, but the prospect of the troop escalation could have emboldened the Sunnis.
Boehner, however, prefers a simpler narrative, one in which he and his colleagues were right and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid and then-Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden were wrong. The video, which was provided to HuffPost by Boehner's office, repeatedly shows the three leaders declaring the war to be lost or the surge to be a failure.
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