When Obama was first elected president, I and many people I know quickly grew frustrated that he was too nice.

He seemed to be of the erroneous opinion that if he played the middle of the road and compromised, his opposition would meet him half way.

It didn’t happen, and it seemed the president was the only one not seeing that.

Then, regardless what he did, and regardless what the facts were, the so called liberal media crawled in bed with the likes of Fox news ignoring the facts and figures, but telling an interesting story not necessarily based on facts.

It seemed that when he could have corrected the misinformation about such things as the stimulus, employment figures, the deficit, and our leaving Iraq, President Obama had just let the media tell the public whatever they chose, true or not, and gave the GOP free reign to write its own story.

The Republicans and the media seemed to have taken a strong grasp of the discourse without being corrected with facts and history.

In spite of what they know to be true, Republican talking points such as the president has done nothing to reduce the national debt, has run it up higher than any other president, has taken more vacations than any previous president, and has overused the power of the executive order, no one seems to be bothered correcting those falsehoods

So, what was my surprise when a reporter asked a question based on what people just accepted as the way things were, and Republicans have pushed, but that a true journalist acknowledging facts would not have asked because it was based on a media urban legend. And it was obvious, minus the eye rolling and the obviously unspoken question, “What the hell are you thinking?” the president was tired of this and finally said it like it was, but, perhaps a little too late.

The reporter asked him if he regretted not leaving troops in Iraq.

This conveniently ignored that U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement that was signed by President Bush agreeing that all combat troops would leave Iraq in December of 2011, and that Maliki would not agree to President Obama’s wanting to keep residual troops in Iraq because Iraq was a sovereign country and the Iraqi government wanted the troops gone.

The president calmly explained:
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And the Iraqi government, based on its political considerations, in part because Iraqis were tired of a U.S. occupation, declined to provide us those assurances. And on that basis, we left. We had offered to leave additional troops. So when you hear people say, do you regret, Mr. President, not leaving more troops, that presupposes that I would have overridden this sovereign government that we had turned the keys back over to and said, you know what, you’re democratic, you’re sovereign, except if I decide that it’s good for you to keep 10,000 or 15,000 or 25,000 Marines in your country, you don’t have a choice — which would have kind of run contrary to the entire argument we were making about turning over the country back to Iraqis, an argument not just made by me, but made by the previous administration.
So let’s just be clear: The reason that we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq was because the Iraqis were — a majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there, and politically they could not pass the kind of laws that would be required to protect our troops in Iraq”.

Finally he spoke up.

He continued:
“Having said all that, if in fact the Iraqi government behaved the way it did over the last five, six years, where it failed to pass legislation that would reincorporate Sunnis and give them a sense of ownership; if it had targeted certain Sunni leaders and jailed them; if it had alienated some of the Sunni tribes that we had brought back in during the so-called Awakening that helped us turn the tide in 2006 — if they had done all those things and we had had troops there, the country wouldn’t be holding together either. The only difference would be we’d have a bunch of troops on the ground that would be vulnerable. And however many troops we had, we would have to now be reinforcing, I’d have to be protecting them, and we’d have a much bigger job. And probably, we would end up having to go up again in terms of the number of grounds troops to make sure that those forces were not vulnerable.

So that entire analysis is bogus and is wrong. But it gets frequently peddled around here by folks who oftentimes are trying to defend previous policies that they themselves made”.

He anticipated potential concerns on Afghanistan, and explain the reality that the media and the Republicans will probably ignore in favor of the fantasies that rile the readers, the viewers, and the voters.

“Going forward with respect to Afghanistan, we are leaving the follow-on force there. I think the lesson for Afghanistan is not the fact that we’ve got a follow-on force that will be capable of training and supporting Afghan security efforts. I think the real lesson in Afghanistan is that if factions in a country after a long period of civil war do not find a way to come up with a political accommodation; if they take maximalist positions and their attitude is, I want 100 percent of what I want and the other side gets nothing, then the center doesn’t hold.

And the good news is, is that in part thanks to the excellent work of John Kerry and others, we now are seeing the two candidates in the recent presidential election start coming together and agreeing not only to move forward on the audit to be able to finally certify a winner in the election, but also the kinds of political accommodations that are going to be required to keep democracy moving.

So that’s a real lesson I think for Afghanistan coming out of Iraq is, if you want this thing to work, then whether it’s different ethnicities, different religions, different regions, they’ve got to accommodate each other, otherwise you start tipping back into old patterns of violence. And it doesn’t matter how many U.S. troops are there — if that happens, you end up having a mess”.

Of course, it would be nice if when the Republicans and media bury this, the administration will keep repeating it loudly and often, gaining control of the discourse.