The Blog @ Spolitics

Obama Was Wrong

Barack Obama has based his candidacy for the Presidency on his supposedly superior judgment.  He points to a speech he gave in 2002 in which he spoke out against the Iraq War.  But Obama wants us to ignore the fact that his opposition of the war was based in relative ignorance.  He was not a member of the federal government and therefore did not have access to the same intelligence reports upon which other members of congress based their support for the war.  Obama says he was “right” about the Iraq war which is a cheap argument given their is no counter example to show us what would have happened if the U.S. backed off, Saddam prevailed and the sanctions crumbled.  It is reasonable to think such a course would have emboldened Saddam and our enemies.  As David Kay told Tom Brokaw:

I think Baghdad was actually becoming more dangerous in the last two years than even we realized.  Saddam was not controlling the society any longer. In the marketplace of terrorism and of WMD, Iraq well could have been that supplier if the war had not intervened. 

As Iraqis are making progress on both the security and political front and the Sunnis set to rejoin the government, it’s worth noting that the 2002 speech wasn’t Barack Obama’s only Iraq War speech.  He’s given others.  In January 2007 when the President announced his surge, Senator Obama put forth a bill to withdraw the troops.  He called the surge “reckless”  and argued that Commander-in-Chief should abdicate his responsibility to an bipartisan study group and let them decide war policy.  Bush, however, went forward with the surge stating:

Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have. Our military commanders reviewed the new Iraqi plan to ensure that it addressed these mistakes. They report that it does. They also report that this plan can work.  

Obama disagreed.  In March of 2007, in support of his bill, Obama said this:

No amount of U.S. soldiers – not 10,000 more, not 20,000 more, not the almost 30,000 more that we now know we are sending– can solve the grievances that lay at the heart of someone else’s civil war. Our troops cannot serve as their diplomats, and we can no longer referee their civil war. We must begin a phased withdrawal of our forces starting May 1st, with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 30th, 2008.

When it comes to the surge, Obama could not have been more wrong.  Obama’s judgment is nowhere near as solid as he would like us to believe.