Why Bush is rooting for Obama

If that happens, there will be poetic justice to it—and no small irony, too—for the truth is that Obama’s debt to Bush is greater than he would ever care to admit. No one can say what the situation in Iraq would be today had Bush not persisted, against the odds and the opposition of the national-security Establishment, with his troop-surge plan at the start of 2007. What’s impossible to dispute, however, is that the surge has worked and that its success bore unexpected benefits for Obama in his contest against McCain. With Iraq demonstrably on the mend (and, of course, the financial system melting down), the war was reduced to insignificance as a campaign issue. And so was the salience of the single question—who would make a better commander-in-chief?—on which McCain might just conceivably have eked out a victory…

The president has long seemed to realize that history’s verdict on his tenure will hinge mainly on Iraq—on what transpires there over the coming years, on whether the country emerges, as Bush hoped, as a relatively peaceful, free, democratic place. Not long ago, that outcome seemed ridiculously far-fetched, but now there are plenty of serious people of both parties daring to think it possible. And one of them must be Obama, who soon will have no small amount of political skin in that game. The situation he will inherit is entirely of Bush’s making. The personnel and policy he’s employing to win the peace are almost certainly to Bush’s liking. They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows, and that is true enough. But it’s nothing compared to the bizarreness of the bunk mates that presidencies inspire.