The Iraq issue

Avi Zenilman:

"I don't think there's any question that Barack Obama should change his plan in Iraq,” Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said early last week, setting a trap. "He is now clinging to a very ideological commitment."

After Obama’s remarks last Thursday signaling that he might change (or “refine,” as Obama has put it) his timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq, Cantor sprung that trap, saying Sunday that the Democratic candidate “is a great politician, but he’s a politician who's caught between a rock and a hard place, politically."

It’s no wonder that Obama, who has referred to “the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11," wants to talk about Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“Afghanistan is sliding toward chaos,” Obama foreign policy adviser Susan Rice said on a conference call last Monday responding to a report that Al Qaeda had reconstituted a safe haven inside Pakistan. “We have five times as many troops in Iraq as we do in Afghanistan, yet John McCain wants to keep our troops in Iraq indefinitely.”

In June, at least 27 American soldiers died in Afghanistan compared with at least 29 in Iraq, according to the Associated Press, and troop deaths including international forces in Afghanistan exceeded those in Iraq for the first time.

Voters, however, have remained more concerned with the war in Iraq than with a broader war on terror.

According to a June 15 ABC News/Washington Post poll, the war in Iraq is still the top issue for 19 percent of voters — more than any other issue, but down significantly from previous years — while only 4 percent identified terrorism and national security as their top concern. (The war in Iraq itself, however, remains deeply unpopular, with just 30 percent of adults favoring it, and 68 percent opposing it in a CNN poll conducted in late June.)

A CNN poll released last week showed voters’ concerns about terrorism at a post-Sept. 11 low, and a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll conducted in mid-March asking which of a list of potential threats voters were most concerned with showed the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan as next to last.

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Iraq is my major issue. It is one of the main reasons I oppose Obama. I doubt the polls look at people like me when they poll this question. I think there is a liberal bias in the polls that suggest that those who think it is the main issue want to get out and lose the war. I want to win it.

The Iraq war has done more to damage al Qaeda than any event so far in the overall war on terror. Al Qaeda made it the central front in their war and they lost it and they also lost the backing of much of the Muslim world in the process.

What Obama and the Democrats overlook is that Iraq was a major distraction for al Qaeda, not the US. If we had not gone into Iraq Saddam would not only have still been in place, but the foreign fighters going to Iraq would have gone to Afghanistan making it a more difficult war. Afghanistan is much more suitable geography for insurgents than Iraq was. Its mountains and caves make it much easier to hide as well as its proximity to Pakistan as a sanctuary..