Barack Obama declared his opposition to the Iraq war early on — in a speech in Chicago in October 2002, some six months before the invasion began — but over the next five years, he has admitted having second thoughts about that early stand, even casting himself as a supporter of President Bush’s conduct of the war.
Speaking Wednesday in Fayetteville, N.C., Obama again said his opposition to the war has been unwavering.
“I am running for president because it’s time to turn the page of a failed ideology … so that we can make pragmatic judgments to keep our country safe,” he said. “That’s what I did when I stood up and opposed this war from the start.”
Yet Obama publicly acknowledged in his 2006 memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” that he once harbored doubts about his initial anti-war posture. After watching the famous statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down by jubilant Iraqis and seeing President Bush declare the end of major combat operations aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, “I began to suspect that I might have been wrong,” Obama says in the book.
During the 2004 Democratic Party convention, Obama declined to criticize the party’s presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry, for having voted for the war, saying: “What would I have done? I don’t know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made.”
The next day, Obama told the Chicago Tribune: “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage.”
And that November, Obama echoed the president, telling PBS’ Charlie Rose: “Once we go in, then we’re committed.” Obama added: “We’ve got to do everything we can to stabilize the country to make it successful because we’ll have too much at stake in the Middle East.”
Obama’s comments on tactical adjustments in the war strategy haven’t always resembled the actual results. The troop buildup in Iraq in 2007 — much like the “surge” President Bush initiated in January of that year — offers an example. Once it was fully implemented, by last June, the surge helped dampen the sectarian violence in Baghdad, with casualties among U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians declining by some 60 percent.
Earlier, Obama had predicted a different result, telling Tim Russert on NBC News’ “Meet the Press”: “We cannot, through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that the situation is going to improve.”
Obama did acknowledge the reductions in violence Wednesday. “Our troops, including so many from Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base, have done a brilliant, magnificent job under the most difficult of circumstances,” he said. “Yet, while we have a general who has used improved tactics to reduce violence — and General Petraeus deserves enormous credit for that — we still have the wrong strategy. … This is why the judgment that matters most on Iraq and on any decision to deploy military force is the judgment made first.”
In Obama’s reminders that he opposed the Iraq war in 2002, he contrasts his record with that of Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war.
Yet a comparison of all 85 votes the Senate has held on Iraq since Obama entered the chamber shows he and Clinton differed only once — when Obama voted to support the nomination of Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq for nearly three years, to become the Army chief of staff.
We aren't leaving Libs so forget it. This guy is all over the map. Whichever way the winds blows. He's no different then any other politician trying to get elected.
