Huckabee position on Iraq more intelligent than Obama's

CNN:

Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama, the front-runners in the race for the White House after Thursday's Iowa caucuses, offer clearly different views on Iraq.

Obama, a Democratic U.S. senator from Illinois, opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. He supports the concept of a "phased withdrawal," a gradual pullout of a brigade or two of U.S. troops from Iraq each month for 16 months.

"There's no military solution to this," Obama said during a debate last April. "We've got to have a political solution, begin a phased withdrawal, and make certain that we've got benchmarks in place so that the Iraqi people can make a determination about how they want to move forward."

Republican Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, supported the war at the start and now supports Gen. David Petraeus' strategy of cautiously reducing troops levels only as security improves.

"I am focused on winning," Huckabee says on his official Web site. "Withdrawal would have serious strategic consequences for us and horrific humanitarian consequences for the Iraqis. If we leave, Iraq's neighbors on all sides will face a refugee crisis and be drawn into the war."

Huckabee and Obama also were on opposite sides of the "surge" strategy. Huckabee supported the plan to temporarily boost U.S. troop numbers in Iraq to stabilize the country.

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Obama has been proven to be dead wrong on the surge strategy, which is really a new counterinsurgency strategy which has worked better than even its proponents expected. If his alternative strategy had been followed Iraq would be in far worse shape and our enemies would be exploiting a victory rather than being on the run. It is an issue the Democrats have been wrong on for over a year and they should pay a political price for that misjudgment in 2008. When the Obama campaign gets outside the echo chamber of the Democrat primaries, it will pay that price.