Obama on Petraeus and the Surge, in 2007 Daniel Fostercorner.nationalreview.comFrom the archives of the New York Times, September 13, 2007:
One day after questioning Gen. David H. Petraeus as he testified before Congress, Mr. Obama and other candidates took their respective cases to voters. On one side of Iowa, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, argued that the administration’s strategy should be given more time to succeed, while across the state, Mr. Obama offered a conflicting view.
“The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq’s leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops,” Mr. Obama said. “Not in six months or one year — now.” In his address, Mr. Obama proposed removing American combat troops at a pace of one or two brigades a month, which is about twice as fast as American commanders in Iraq have deemed prudent. There are currently about 20 combat brigades in Iraq, which General Petraeus has committed to reducing to 15 next summer.
Under the Obama plan, no more than 10 brigades would be in Iraq at that point. Military experts who supported the administration’s “surge” strategy called the troop levels proposed by Mr. Obama insufficient.
“That is a precipitous withdrawal,” said Jack Keane, the former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army and an early proponent of the administration’s strategy. “What it does is squander all the gains we made in the past five to six months. What it would do is turn Baghdad over to the extremists.”
Polls suggest that there is considerable public support for the approach outlined by Mr. Obama. In the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, 56 percent of Americans said they favored reducing troops levels in Iraq, but leaving some forces in place to train Iraqi forces, fight terrorists and protect American diplomats.
Twenty-two percent favored a complete withdrawal in the next year, and 20 percent favored keeping the same number of troops “until there is a stable democracy in Iraq.”
Several of Mr. Obama’s Democratic rivals said yesterday that the senator was taking a step backward by not giving a specific deadline for withdrawal.
“Senator Obama has a gift for soaring rhetoric, but, on this critical issue, we need to know the substance of his position with specificity,” said one of them, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut.
Another, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, said: “Leaving behind tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for an indefinite amount of time is nothing new. This plan is inadequate and does not end the war.”
Mr. Obama delivered his remarks in an address at Ashford University in Clinton, Iowa. While he did not directly mention Mrs. Clinton by name, the words in his speech and the name of the city in which he chose to give his speech made his point clear.
“Too many politicians feared looking weak and failed to ask hard questions. Too many took the president at his word instead of reading the intelligence for themselves,” Mr. Obama said.
He added: “I opposed the war in 2002. I opposed it in 2003. I opposed it in 2004. I opposed it in 2005. I opposed it in 2006.”
Here is then-Senator Obama's opening statement from his questioning of Petraeus in 2007:
