So, as we saw the other day (link) President Bush and his favored successor John McCain have started to look toward their ostensible rival Barack Obama for ideas on how to keep America safe, although they are not yet admitting it!
Since then a couple more examples of this welcome phenomenon have materialized. As you may know, Senator Obama has consistently promised to withdraw our troops from Iraq on a 16-month timetable as soon as he takes office, in consultation with commanders “on the ground” to make this withdrawal as smooth and safe as possible. Bush and McCain have consistently painted this as cut-and-run defeatism, “letting the terrorists win,” and even a charitable reading of their position shows that they’d both like to stay indefinitely whether conditions there get better or worse.
But as of Thursday Bush was singing a new tune, as close to Obama’s as he could muster given his tone-deafness: Having spent years railing against “benchmarks” and “time tables” for leaving Iraq, his wordsmiths have now given us “time horizons” and “aspirational goals”—literally quite meaningless phrases, but it seems unmistakeable what they portend: Bush is fixin’ to cut and run!
And this is probably because his very own handpicked Iraqi puppets have come to life and are evicting him, by explicitly endorsing Obama’s withdrawal plan:
“US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months,” Maliki told German news magazine Der Spiegel. “That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”
Not to worry though, this doesn’t mean we lost! Says Maliki: “So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat. But that isn’t the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias.”
ALSO. Remember how crazy, amateurish and irresponsible they all said Obama was last year when he said that he would “go after high-value Al Qaeda suspects in Pakistan if the Pakistani government wouldn’t,” and how everybody pretended he said he was going to invade or even nuke our great ally Pakistan? Well, in this video, renowned national security expert Richard Clarke tells us that not only was that a gross distortion of what Obama said, but Bush has actually done the exact thing Obama described at least four times this year:
All right, all right, I think we all have to grow out of the kneejerk accusing each other of flipflopping. (And I’m not saying that because Obama has flipflopped on the war, which he hasn’t.) It’s a good thing for changing events to influence a politician’s positions as long as they’re not obviously doing it just for votes, and it’s possible to keep track of their positions. And it’s also perfectly understandable for a candidate like, say, for example, McCain, not to say, “You know what, my opponent was right all along and I was wrong.” But I think an objective look at both of their records shows that Senator Barack Obama has a much better grasp of foreign policy, the US’s role in the world, and how to keep this nation safe and strong, than his borderline-psychotic opponent. Here’s a very fair comparison video of the highlights of both their recent foreign policy speeches, I don’t think any McCain supporters can claim he is excerpted unfairly here. Which man’s vision fits yours for the next eight years?
UPDATE: Well, look who’s caught up with me and Josh Marshal on this whole question: the Obama campaign themselves! Now that’s a quick-ass response, for a Democratic campaign:
There are two problems with John McCain’s political attacks on Barack Obama’s foreign policy. First, on the biggest foreign policy questions of the last eight years, Barack Obama has made the right judgment and John McCain has sided with George Bush in making the wrong one. Second, the failure of the McCain-Bush foreign policy has forced John McCain to change his position, and to embrace the very same Obama approaches that he once attacked.
Just this week, Senator McCain has been forced by events to switch to Barack Obama’s position on two fundamental issues: more troops in Afghanistan, and more diplomacy with Iran. On both issues, Obama took stands that weren’t politically popular at the time – opposing the war in Iraq as a diversion from the critical mission in Afghanistan, and standing up for direct diplomacy with Iran – while John McCain lined up with George Bush. Time has proven Obama’s judgment right and McCain wrong.
The next shift appears to be Iraq. For months, Senator McCain has called any plan to redeploy our troops from Iraq “surrender” – even though we’d be leaving Iraq to a sovereign Iraqi government. Now, the Bush Administration is embracing the negotiation of troop withdrawals with the Iraqi government – a position that Senator Obama called for last September, and reiterated on Monday in the New York Times. And now, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports Barack Obama’s timeline, telling Der Speigel that, “Barack Obama is right when he talks about 16 months.” … MORE
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