Don't Go In; Now, Get Out
Mike Hashimoto and Rodger Jones are up to some very creative historical revisionism today, trying to paint Barack Obama as a flip-flopper on Iraq.
On The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, Hashimoto quotes at length from other analysts who call Obama's position a "circular path" of "ad hoc judgments" and "cynical judgments." Jones himself calls Obama's Iraq position a "zig-zag." This is called attacking a candidate's strength. It sounds foolish, it is foolish, but repeated often enough, it might just get enough voters convinced that Obama wasn't right on the war, after all, to make a difference in the election.
Let's get real. Obama opposed the war from the beginning. Once the fatal mistake was made, Obama supported the troops, not the war. He was always looking for ways to redirect America's attention back on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. If additional military action in Iraq was needed to stabilize the country enough to allow a safe withdrawal of American forces, Obama was willing to give it a chance. Time demonstrated the limits of that strategy. The "surge", coupled with ethnic cleansing and millions of refugees leaving their homes or their country, has led to a reduction in violence, but not to a political reconciliation. Obama now sees gradual withdrawal as a way of prodding the political factions to resolve their differences. There's no guarantee it will work. But there's no guarantee that the Bush/McCain "stay the course" strategy will lead to any better outcome if and when American troops eventually do withdraw. McCain's contentment with a 100 year presence in Iraq is simply unrealistic.
In short, Obama's position on the war has been consistent. He opposed it, first, last, always. His judgment proved correct then. His judgment can be trusted now, as he says, "We have to be as careful getting out of Iraq as Bush was careless getting into Iraq."
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