A forgotten post...

This is a post I had written back on 7/26/08 and somehow forgot to post it...

Senator Barack Obama intelligently chose to go to Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Israel and Palestine. Now some can argue that he simply caved into Senator John McCain's campaign constant talking point that it'd been "over 900 days and counting" since he had last been. Since this blog isn't to get childish, let us move on. This is where Obama should have stopped and come home. He had a fantastic couple of days while in the middle-east, especially with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki talking about Obama's plan sounding "about right" to him. (Keep in mind that Maliki in no way explicitly endorsed Obama's plan and made a point to state, through his spokesman, that conditions would have to be part of it. He also used the term "with slight changes". These absolutely important distinctions were somehow missed by a large part of reporters and especially Obama support "talking point pundits" on TV.)

Obama may have made the mistake of being a tad too specific in what tribal leaders and Gen. Petreus said to him in private talks but he wasn't overly specific where it could be obvious which way the tribal leaders saw his plan. People seem to not have noticed that his plan did, or more accurately his talking points of his Iraq plan did change even while over there. While Sen. McCain and others get swept up in Sen. Obama still using the words "16 months", he is more and more talking about conditions and leaving enough troops to help the Iraqi forces. One of his aides has even said those forces would ideally be between 60-80,000 troops, hardly an insignificant level at the rate the Iraqi forces are gaining in strength and experience.

You never want to be overly specific as to your foreign policy plans, specifically in regards to a war and so far he hasn't been. This has however, allowed McCain and his supporters to claim Obama is somehow still stuck on having all US troops home within 16 months of him becoming president, if elected. As this really was once his plan, it isn't any longer and hasn’t been for at least a year now. (It is important to mention that Obama himself didn’t view his plan as a way to lose in Iraq; obviously some would argue his original plan would’ve guaranteed failure in Iraq but he didn’t see it that way. Take that as you the reader wish.)

He gave up saying all US troops would be home within 16 months early in his primary race and when the evidence the surge was working/had worked became overwhelming; even if he failed to acknowledge it soon enough. It is one thing to make the fair & accurate point that one can never know how history would've turned out if another path had been chosen. To say you wouldn't have changed your opinion of the surge if you could go back in time because you still believe your plan may very well have done the same thing the surge did is even okay. To not outright admit one was wrong about what the surge would do is pure stubbornness. Or is it? Or is their enough facts, or nuance, that makes him technicaly correct? Or isn’t this really just politics by Obama? It should be hard to imagine a man of such education and such a diverse upbringing could not see that he was in fact wrong about the surge, let alone anything with such evidence to the contrary. This isn’t Obama being stubborn, this is Obama playing politics. This is pure politics. Typically only two kinds of politicians exist: those that admit when an opponent was right and he/she was wrong and those that never do. Depending on whom his opponent is Sen. Obama is in the middle. When debating with Sen. Hillary Clinton he said he agreed with her and she was right a couple of times, not even doing the typical politician thing of adding to her point. Now Obama and Hillary were 90% the same candidate so that isn’t surprising. That also doesn’t make it surprising that when his opponent is Sen. McCain, he’s only willing to agree with him about global warming.

Now it is equally fair of him, even extremely accurate of him, to point out that more US troops wasn't the sole reason violence went back down. Other key parts to it were the Sen. Obama was even talked about highly by Palestinians as well as Israeli's for whatever opinions Obama seemed to share with them. That was important because he is having trouble with the Jewish vote in America unlike many Democratic candidates before him. Polls over time will show whether it helped him or not with Jewish voters but his campaign I'm sure is hoping it did.