President Donald J. Trump, joined by First Lady Melania Trump, addresses his remarks to U.S. troops Wednesday, December 26, 2018, at the Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
President Trump has gone a long way to dismantling Obama’s legacy in the region. But much more remains to be done, explains Erielle Davidson in The Federalist, “including a halt to American taxpayer money that has been flowing into Iranian-controlled governments in Iraq and Lebanon.”
For those on the left, Ms. Davidson notes, there is a strong desire to salvage the remnants of President Obama’s legacy, which comes at the “expense of revealing the true nature of Iraqi unrest.”
It’s not only irresponsible but further reveals the level of perpetual dishonesty needed to sustain popular support (or at minimum, acceptance) of the Iran Deal. If your strategy requires lying to justify its existence, perhaps it’s not such a fantastic approach.
The New York Times has labeled the attackers “mourners” responding to the U.S. strikes, while the front page of the first Washington Post edition of 2020 labeled them “protesters.” The latter is a particularly pernicious mislabeling. The media has done its best to conflate the attacks with anti-Iran protests that have been happening across Iraq for the last three months, but of course those actual protesters are pro-Iraqi sovereignty demonstrators fed up with the corruption and the broad perception that the Iraqi government is controlled by Iran.
The media’s goal is to characterize the protests as a wholesale rejection of Trump’s policies in the region, hence the wall-to-wall disinformation about mourning and protesting.
What’s actually at stake is Obama’s legacy. The Iran Deal was a bargain in which Iran would be handed control over the Middle East in exchange for some temporary limitations on nuclear activities.
As Obama said, the Saudis — by which he meant Sunnis across the region — would just have to learn to “share the neighborhood” with Iran.
The attack on our embassy shows what sharing the region actually means, and the anti-Iran Iraqi protesters are saying they reject it.
Read more here.
