Bush and Obama, Wars and Economy: Power and People in an Age of Limits and Loss 569when first uttered. Although the number of American soldiers, and deaths,
decreased after 2007, that was due mostly to political arrangements made by
U.S. officials—paying off and arming about 30,000 Sunni militants who had
just before that been the target of American attacks. But politically, which is
after all the final way to judge a war, the U.S. had alienated the Iraqis and
most of the world, and had encouraged enemies. Not only did American
people think Iraq “wasn’t worth it” in polling data by huge margins [at least
60 percent disapproval in every poll in 2009-10] but the Iraqis themselves
wanted the U.S. out. Inside Iraq, in a late 2007 poll, over 70 percent of the
Iraqis believed that the surge had failed and security had deteriorated. By
spring 2008, as presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain were
trying to show who was more hawkish and attacking the idea of a “timeline”
for withdrawal, the Iraqi government itself asked the U.S. to set a date for
getting out of Iraq. In the spring of 2009, after President Obama met with
military commanders to charge them with preparing a withdrawal plan, an
Iraqi military spokesman endorsed the U.S. departure, saying “if the US pull-
out comes early, our Iraqi forces have prepared for this.”
FIGuRE 11-6 u.S. Marine communicates via radio during Operation Defeat
al-Qaeda in Iraq, June 11, 2008