As Jay Tea noted earlier, Barack Obama was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly this evening on Fox News. He’s position on the surge (he said it would never work and we should have cut and run instead) has now got him triangulating ways to avoid admitting he was wrong. From the transcript:
MR. O’REILLY: I think you were desperately wrong on the surge. And I think you should admit it to the nation that now we have defeated the terrorists in Iraq. And the al Qaeda came there after we invaded, as you know. Okay, we’ve defeated them. If we didn’t, they would have used it as a staging ground.
We’ve also inhibited Iran from controlling the southern part of Iraq by the surge which you did not support. So why won’t you say, I was right in the beginning, I was wrong about that?
SEN. OBAMA: You know, if you’ve listened to what I’ve said, and I’ll repeat it right here on this show, I think that there’s no doubt that the violence in down. I believe that that is a testimony to the troops that were sent and General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated, by the way, including President Bush and the other supporters.
It has gone very well, partly because of the Anbar situation and the Sunni —
MR. O’REILLY: The awakening, right.
SEN. OBAMA: — awakening, partly because the Shi’a —
MR. O’REILLY: But if it were up to you, there wouldn’t have been a surge.
SEN. OBAMA: Well, look —
MR. O’REILLY: No, no, no, no.
SEN. OBAMA: No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
MR. O’REILLY: If it were up to you, there wouldn’t have been a surge.
SEN. OBAMA: No, no, no, no. Hold on.
MR. O’REILLY: You and Joe Biden — no surge.
SEN. OBAMA: No. Hold on a second, Bill. If you look at the debate that was taking place, we had gone through five years of mismanagement of this war that I thought was disastrous. And the president wanted to double-down and continue on open-ended policy that did not create the kinds of pressure in the Iraqis to take responsibility and reconcile —
MR. O’REILLY: It worked. Come on.
SEN. OBAMA: Bill, what I’ve said is — I’ve already said it succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
MR. O’REILLY: Right! So why can’t you just say, I was right in the beginning, and I was wrong about the surge?
SEN. OBAMA: Because there is an underlying problem with what we’ve done. We have reduced the violence —
MR. O’REILLY: Yeah?
SEN. OBAMA: — but the Iraqis still haven’t taken a responsibility. And we still don’t have the kind of political reconciliation. We are still spending, Bill, 10 (billion dollars) to $12 billion a month.
Peter Wehner in The Weekly Standard notes that the undeniable success of the surge has come back to haunt Sen. Obama (and other Democrats) who favored a hasty retreat instead of a new offensive strategy:
The trap was set when Obama repeatedly insisted that his superior “judgment” on Iraq is more important than experience in national security affairs. Judgment, according to Obama, is what qualifies him to be commander in chief. So what can we discern about Obama’s judgment on the surge, easily the most important national security decision since the Iraq war began in March 2003?
To answer that question, we need to revisit what Obama said about the surge around the time it was announced. In October 2006–three months before the president’s new strategy was unveiled–Obama said, “It is clear at this point that we cannot, through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that somehow the situation is going to improve, and we have to do something significant to break the pattern that we’ve been in right now.“
On January 10, 2007, the night the surge was announced, Obama declared, “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” A week later, he insisted the surge strategy would “not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly.” And in reaction to the president’s January 23 State of the Union address, Obama said, “I don’t think the president’s strategy is going to work. We went through two weeks of hearings on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; experts from across the spectrum–military and civilian, conservative and liberal–expressed great skepticism about it. My suggestion to the president has been that the only way we’re going to change the dynamic in Iraq and start seeing political commendation is actually if we create a system of phased redeployment. And, frankly, the president, I think, has not been willing to consider that option, not because it’s not militarily sound but because he continues to cling to the belief that somehow military solutions are going to lead to victory in Iraq.“
In July, after evidence was amassing that the surge was working, Obama said, “My assessment is that the surge has not worked.”
Obama, then, was not only wrong about the surge; he was spectacularly wrong. And he continued to remain wrong even as mounting evidence of its success gave way to overwhelming evidence of its success.
The difference between Obama and McCain could not be any clearer. Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election.
Lorie adds: Tom McGuire has a great post at Just One Minute which chronicles Obama’s shifting positions on the war in Iraq and the surge.
