The Blog @ Spolitics

Obama’s Slight of Tongue On Iraq… What the Press Missed

by Heywood U. Reedmore -- July 4, 2008 at 12:22 pm | In 2008 Election |

Obama was blasted yesterday after suggesting he’d revise his policy on withdrawing troops from Iraq.  Obama quickly addressed the press again to clarify his remarks.  It wasn’t a good moment for him.  He was snippy and condescending, starting with:

“We’re going to try this again.  Apparently I wasn’t clear enough this morning on my position with respect to the war in Iraq.”

Presumably it was the press’s fault for misunderstanding what Obama meant when he promised a “thorough assessment” of his policies on Iraq.  Of course, they knew exactly what he meant… he was creating space to backtrack from his pledge to remove all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months.  He was just upset that they called him on it. 

But there was another slight of hand that the press missed.  Obama slipped one more condition into the list of reasons why his policy might change.  Obama said:

“My guiding approach continues to be that we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable.”

When he addressed the press a second time to clarify his remarks he reiterated the point:

“My guiding approach continues to be that we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable. I’m going to continue to gather information to find out whether those conditions still hold.”

Iraq’s stability is a new condition and his assertion that he “has always said” this is a flat out lie.  First, consider these remarks to Charles Gibson during the ABC debate:

GIBSON: And, Senator Obama, your campaign manager, David Plouffe, said, “When he is” — this is talking about you — “When he is elected president, we will be out of Iraq in 16 months at the most. There should be no confusion about that.”  So you’d give the same rock-hard pledge, that no matter what the military commanders said, you would give the order to bring them home?

OBAMA: Because the commander-in-chief sets the mission, Charlie.  That’s not the role of the generals.  And one of the things that’s been interesting about the president’s approach lately has been to say, “Well, I’m just taking cues from General Petraeus.”  Well, the president sets the mission. The general and our troops carry out that mission. And, unfortunately, we have had a bad mission set by our civilian leadership, which our military has performed brilliantly. But it is time for us to set a strategy that is going to make the American people safer.

Now, I will always listen to our commanders on the ground with respect to tactics, once I’ve given them a new mission, that we are going to proceed deliberately, in an orderly fashion, out of Iraq, and we are going to have our combat troops out.

When he introduced his Iraq War De-escalation Act in January of 2007 Senator Obama made it clear that he believed there was no military solution in Iraq and it was time to get the troops out.  His plan called for them to be out by March of this year.  While he did say the redeployment could be temporarily suspended if the Iraqis met certain benchmarks, he did not say it would be suspended or “refined” to ensure Iraq’s stability.  In fact, quite the opposite.  Obama argued that withdrawing the troops would put pressure on the Iraqis to end their civil war.  By his mind, withdrawing the troops would bring stability. 

He said it more plainly in March, 2007 when he was opposing the surge:

There is no military solution to this war. 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.

We also must make sure that we’re not as careless getting out of this war as we were getting in, and that’s why this withdrawal should be gradual, and keep some U.S. troops in the region to prevent a wider war and go after Al Qaeda and other terrorists.

But it must begin soon. Letting the Iraqis know that we will not be there forever is our last, best hope to pressure the Iraqis to take ownership of their country and bring an end to their conflict. It is time for our troops to start coming home.

So why did Obama slyly add this new condition for reconsidering his plan to withdraw troops from Iraq?  He’s paving the road behind him so he can walk back from his irresponsible campaign pledge.  When clarifying his earlier remarks Obama was carefully parsing his words.  He said his policy has not changed (yet).  He said he has not seen any information that would lead him to believe he couldn’t have the troops out in 16 months (yet).  Of course he hasn’t seen that information.  He hasn’t met with the generals in Iraq yet. 

Prediction: After Obama meets with the generals he will “refine” his withdrawal policy and cite the need to keep Iraq stable as the reason.  He will try to have us believe that he has “consistently” (his favorite word) said his plan to withdraw the troops was contingent on Iraq’s stability and he will point to these remarks as proof that he is not flip-flopping.  Of course, to believe him we’ll have to forget that he was the one trying to withdraw the troops while Iraq was in the middle of a civil war.