Barack Obama, you’ll recall, campaigned as the antiwar candidate, at least insofar as Iraq was concerned.  Iraq was a “war of choice,” according to him, one that should not have been fought, and he defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries precisely because of her support for Bush’s war.

Not that there was anything principled about his stand: His reason for opposing the invasion was that it detracted from the war in Afghanistan, which, he claimed, was the theater we really needed to be operating in.

In spite of this, he was portrayed in the media, and by his other supporters, as the President who would repudiate the Bush foreign policy, especially where it concerns Iraq.  This, at least, is what Obama’s base expected to hear when he announced the withdrawal of the last of our combat troops.  What they didn’t expect to hear was what sounded like a retrospective endorsement of that war.

But that is precisely what they got.

According to the President, the invasion, far from being a mistake, was “a war to disarm a state” that “became a fight against an insurgency.”  Yet there was little, if anything, to disarm: Those “weapons of mass destruction” we heard so much about in the run-up to war were nowhere to be found.

Framing his speech in the form of a thank-you letter to the troops, Obama declared,

They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people.  Together with Iraqis and coalition partners who made huge sacrifices of their own, our troops fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future.  They shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people; trained Iraqi Security Forces; and took out terrorist leaders.  Because of our troops and civilians—and because of the resilience of the Iraqi people—Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain.

This could be George W. Bush talking.

If the Iraqis were being terrorized before the invasion, at least it wasn’t by foreigners.  “A better future” hardly describes the state of Iraq today, or her likely state tomorrow: With half a million Iraqis in their graves on account of the “liberation,” and government death squads roaming the land, the future of Iraq looks grim indeed.  Those terrorist leaders Obama claims to have taken out would never have been in Iraq, were it not for the U.S. invasion.  As for “embracing a new destiny,” Iraq is fated to remain a battlefield, rather than a country, for quite a while yet.  How many actual Iraqis embrace such a fate?

Virtually every word of Obama’s speech on the Iraq “withdrawal” was a lie.  To begin with, we aren’t leaving; we are digging in.  For every “combat” troop going home, a mercenary (“military contractor”) is taking his place.  And the “new mission” is indistinguishable, in practice, from the old mission, because the distinction between “combat troops” and “noncombat troops” is a distinction without a difference.  All of our troops are “combat troops”: The concept of “noncombat troops” is a not-very-convincing invention of the President’s speechwriters and advisors.  As news of yet more casualties in Iraq punctures this presidential fantasy, one can only wonder how his scribes will scramble to explain it to the American public.

Without a government—many months after the elections, the contending parties still can’t agree on who should be prime minister—and with the insurgency rising up once more (the number and intensity of attacks have increased), Gen. Ray Odierno, top U.S. commander in Iraq, had already raised the possibility of U.S. forces “returning” to Iraq—and this was two days before the President’s “Farewell, Iraq” speech.

The rhetoric employed by Obama is a curious mix of Bush triumphalism—“out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born”—and realist tropes, topped off with a desperate plea that Americans “turn the page.”  Openly acknowledging that he and his predecessor disagreed about the necessity of the Iraq war, Obama nevertheless hails the War Party as “patriots,” while conferring on war opponents the same “patriotic” credentials.  This kind of “we’re all in this together” talk is—like practically everything this administration does—a political ploy: Obama needs the War Party (the Republicans in Congress) to continue their support for his Afghan adventure, as his own party has repeatedly deserted him.

This exercise in presidential hair-splitting teaches us one thing: No matter what party is in power, the War Party reigns supreme.  When it comes to foreign policy, American politics truly stops at the water’s edge.