Obama's surge gaffe

Kathleen Parker:

Barack Obama concedes that America’s troops have contributed to improvements on the ground in Iraq, but he still stands by his vote against the surge.

Why not just admit that he was wrong?

Come on, senator, this is a lot easier than changing churches. Say: “As a proud American, I’m delighted that the surge has worked so we can move forward with my timetable for withdrawal. Look, if I’d known how successful it was going to be, I would have voted for it. At the time it didn’t seem like a good bet, but prognosticators go broke in wartime.”

See, that wasn’t so bad.

Instead, Obama says that even knowing what he now knows, he still would have voted against the surge. Really? Even knowing that without the surge, he couldn’t have safely visited Iraq?

Obama insists that, hypothetically, his own plan might have worked better than the surge: “We don’t know what would have happened if I, if the plan that I put forward in January 2007, to put more pressure on the Iraqis to arrive at a political reconciliation, to begin a phased withdrawal, what would have happened had we pursued that strategy.”

But we do know. Or at least we can wager with some confidence that had we withdrawn within 14 months, as Obama was proposing at the time — before Sunni Arabs, once the insurgency’s backbone, felt sufficiently secure to turn against the jihadists — Iraq today would be in bloody chaos, al-Qaeda victorious, and the U.S. further diminished in the Arab world.

Obama voted against the surge, he said then, because he was convinced that inserting 20,000 more troops into Iraq was likely to make things worse, not better. Now trying to justify that miscall, he says he couldn’t have anticipated the Sunni Awakening.

Wait. Obama could anticipate that the war in Iraq would go badly. He could anticipate that the surge wouldn’t work. But he couldn’t anticipate that the Sunnis would turn on al-Qaeda?

...

Actually the Sunni awakening began before the surge troops were sent to Iraq. It began with the early use of the counterinsurgency strategy which McCain has mentioned. But what is really bogus about Obama's current assertions about how his plan might have worked too is that at the time he was also willing to accept genocide to effect his plan. That does not sound like a guy who thought that a pullout would actually lead to reconciliation. It sounds like a guy who wanted to bug out regardless of the cost.

I think this gaffe is one reason why Obama did not get the bump that the media thought he would get out of his trip. It has been sitting there like an angry zit on the face of this trip and many in the media have chosen to ignore it because they liked the theatrics of his "landings" in various locations. When the headlines are all about the safe landing you know there is not much of substance happening in the eyes of the reporters. They should have paid closer attention to his interviews with ABC and CBS. It might just be were he lost the election.