Obama's hope--al Qaeda will leave Iraq?

Steve Huntley:

The political salvos over Iraq between Barack Obama and John McCain the other day made for good political theater. More important, the exchange offered a revealing contrast between the politics of realism and the politics of hope.

It began with a question to Obama during the Democratic presidential debate Tuesday. Obama has pledged to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq and was asked if he reserved the right to go back into Iraq. He responded that "if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad."

The next day McCain mocked Obama, ''I have some news. Al-Qaida is in Iraq." Obama fired back, ''I do know that al-Qaida is in Iraq and that's why I have said we should continue to strike al-Qaida targets. But I have some news for John McCain. There was no such thing as al-Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq."

So what is Obama's Iraq strategy? It seems to be that he knows al-Qaida is in Iraq but he's going to pull out anyway. But if al-Qaida establishes a base in Iraq, he will go back in. Does that sound confused to you? Me, too.

His policy, in a nutshell, seems to be this: Pull troops out of Iraq and hope for the best. And anyway, the real issue is what cowboy Bush and McCain did five years ago.

Given the nation's weariness with the war, that message has proved to be appealing to Democratic primary voters. They want no truck with the grim realism of McCain's position that Iraq is part of the wider struggle against Islamist jihadism and will require a long-term U.S. commitment. Arguing over what happened in 2003 is a way to avoid facing today's realities, McCain reasonably argues.

...

What this episode demonstrates is how little the Democrat primary campaign has prepared Obama for the real world outside the echo chamber of the MoveOn Democrats. It also reveals the hollowness of his pledge to "end the war." Even he recognizes that all he can do is order a retreat. To end this war we have to defeat the enemy. That is something Obama appears to have no strategic vision of how to accomplish.

He is setting the Democrats up for a McGovern like debacle.

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