The Blog @ Spolitics

Obama’s Slight of Tongue On Iraq… What the Press Missed

Obama was blasted yesterday after suggesting he’d revise his policy on withdrawing troops from Iraq.  Obama quickly addressed the press again to clarify his remarks.  It wasn’t a good moment for him.  He was snippy and condescending, starting with:

“We’re going to try this again.  Apparently I wasn’t clear enough this morning on my position with respect to the war in Iraq.”

Presumably it was the press’s fault for misunderstanding what Obama meant when he promised a “thorough assessment” of his policies on Iraq.  Of course, they knew exactly what he meant… he was creating space to backtrack from his pledge to remove all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months.  He was just upset that they called him on it. 

But there was another slight of hand that the press missed.  Obama slipped one more condition into the list of reasons why his policy might change.  Obama said:

“My guiding approach continues to be that we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable.”

When he addressed the press a second time to clarify his remarks he reiterated the point:

“My guiding approach continues to be that we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable. I’m going to continue to gather information to find out whether those conditions still hold.”

Iraq’s stability is a new condition and his assertion that he “has always said” this is a flat out lie.  First, consider these remarks to Charles Gibson during the ABC debate:

GIBSON: And, Senator Obama, your campaign manager, David Plouffe, said, “When he is” — this is talking about you — “When he is elected president, we will be out of Iraq in 16 months at the most. There should be no confusion about that.”  So you’d give the same rock-hard pledge, that no matter what the military commanders said, you would give the order to bring them home?

OBAMA: Because the commander-in-chief sets the mission, Charlie.  That’s not the role of the generals.  And one of the things that’s been interesting about the president’s approach lately has been to say, “Well, I’m just taking cues from General Petraeus.”  Well, the president sets the mission. The general and our troops carry out that mission. And, unfortunately, we have had a bad mission set by our civilian leadership, which our military has performed brilliantly. But it is time for us to set a strategy that is going to make the American people safer.

Now, I will always listen to our commanders on the ground with respect to tactics, once I’ve given them a new mission, that we are going to proceed deliberately, in an orderly fashion, out of Iraq, and we are going to have our combat troops out.

When he introduced his Iraq War De-escalation Act in January of 2007 Senator Obama made it clear that he believed there was no military solution in Iraq and it was time to get the troops out.  His plan called for them to be out by March of this year.  While he did say the redeployment could be temporarily suspended if the Iraqis met certain benchmarks, he did not say it would be suspended or “refined” to ensure Iraq’s stability.  In fact, quite the opposite.  Obama argued that withdrawing the troops would put pressure on the Iraqis to end their civil war.  By his mind, withdrawing the troops would bring stability. 

He said it more plainly in March, 2007 when he was opposing the surge:

There is no military solution to this war. No amount of U.S. soldiers – not 10,000 more, not 20,000 more, not the almost 30,000 more that we now know we are sending– can solve the grievances that lay at the heart of someone else’s civil war. Our troops cannot serve as their diplomats, and we can no longer referee their civil war. We must begin a phased withdrawal of our forces starting May 1st, with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 30th, 2008.

We also must make sure that we’re not as careless getting out of this war as we were getting in, and that’s why this withdrawal should be gradual, and keep some U.S. troops in the region to prevent a wider war and go after Al Qaeda and other terrorists.

But it must begin soon. Letting the Iraqis know that we will not be there forever is our last, best hope to pressure the Iraqis to take ownership of their country and bring an end to their conflict. It is time for our troops to start coming home.

So why did Obama slyly add this new condition for reconsidering his plan to withdraw troops from Iraq?  He’s paving the road behind him so he can walk back from his irresponsible campaign pledge.  When clarifying his earlier remarks Obama was carefully parsing his words.  He said his policy has not changed (yet).  He said he has not seen any information that would lead him to believe he couldn’t have the troops out in 16 months (yet).  Of course he hasn’t seen that information.  He hasn’t met with the generals in Iraq yet. 

Prediction: After Obama meets with the generals he will “refine” his withdrawal policy and cite the need to keep Iraq stable as the reason.  He will try to have us believe that he has “consistently” (his favorite word) said his plan to withdraw the troops was contingent on Iraq’s stability and he will point to these remarks as proof that he is not flip-flopping.  Of course, to believe him we’ll have to forget that he was the one trying to withdraw the troops while Iraq was in the middle of a civil war.

Obama Flip-Flops on Patriotism

June 30, 2008:

So let me say at this at outset of my remarks. I will never question the patriotism of others in this campaign. And I will not stand idly by when I hear others question mine.

My concerns here aren’t simply personal, however. After all, throughout our history, men and women of far greater stature and significance than me have had their patriotism questioned in the midst of momentous debates.

And some of them had their patriotism questioned by Obama himself.  October 5, 2007 (from Obama’s own campaign Website even):

‘I’m less concerned about what you are wearing on your lapel than what’s in your heart,’ [Obama] said under a county fairgrounds pavilion here, a giant American flag draped behind him. ‘You show your patriotism by how you treat your fellow Americans, especially those ones who served.’ He suggested that some politicians who wear such pins act in disingenuous ways. ‘After a while, you know, you start noticing people wearing a lapel pin, but not acting very patriotic, not voting to provide veterans with the resources that they need,’ he said.”

It seems Obama is going to have to renounce himself. 

Obama Was Wrong

Barack Obama has based his candidacy for the Presidency on his supposedly superior judgment.  He points to a speech he gave in 2002 in which he spoke out against the Iraq War.  But Obama wants us to ignore the fact that his opposition of the war was based in relative ignorance.  He was not a member of the federal government and therefore did not have access to the same intelligence reports upon which other members of congress based their support for the war.  Obama says he was “right” about the Iraq war which is a cheap argument given their is no counter example to show us what would have happened if the U.S. backed off, Saddam prevailed and the sanctions crumbled.  It is reasonable to think such a course would have emboldened Saddam and our enemies.  As David Kay told Tom Brokaw:

I think Baghdad was actually becoming more dangerous in the last two years than even we realized.  Saddam was not controlling the society any longer. In the marketplace of terrorism and of WMD, Iraq well could have been that supplier if the war had not intervened. 

As Iraqis are making progress on both the security and political front and the Sunnis set to rejoin the government, it’s worth noting that the 2002 speech wasn’t Barack Obama’s only Iraq War speech.  He’s given others.  In January 2007 when the President announced his surge, Senator Obama put forth a bill to withdraw the troops.  He called the surge “reckless”  and argued that Commander-in-Chief should abdicate his responsibility to an bipartisan study group and let them decide war policy.  Bush, however, went forward with the surge stating:

Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have. Our military commanders reviewed the new Iraqi plan to ensure that it addressed these mistakes. They report that it does. They also report that this plan can work.  

Obama disagreed.  In March of 2007, in support of his bill, Obama said this:

No amount of U.S. soldiers – not 10,000 more, not 20,000 more, not the almost 30,000 more that we now know we are sending– can solve the grievances that lay at the heart of someone else’s civil war. Our troops cannot serve as their diplomats, and we can no longer referee their civil war. We must begin a phased withdrawal of our forces starting May 1st, with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 30th, 2008.

When it comes to the surge, Obama could not have been more wrong.  Obama’s judgment is nowhere near as solid as he would like us to believe.