Clinton-Obama on Iraq: The silence is deafening
Friday, January 11th, 2008
Pondering the ‘08 presidential candidates this week, with the primaries finally underway, I find that recent changes in the Democrat strategy are most telling.
Whatever happened to the Left’s relentless protests about Operation Iraqi Freedom—you know, the quagmire in Mesopotamia? Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who never let a media minute pass a few months back without condemning OIF, have been all but silent on the conflict.
Why, it’s almost as if their traitorous use of OIF sound bites for campaign cannon fodder has decreased as the success rate of our military campaign in the region has increased.
Could it be?
Indeed, the inverse relationship between the frequency of the Left’s objections to OIF, and our successes in the region, is painfully clear. As our combat forces have proven the value of General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy, “the surge,” they have also reduced the Democrats’ political objections to campaign-trail rubble.
Of course, when pressed for answers on OIF, as they were at last week’s debates in New Hampshire, Clinton and Obama provide answers that will keep linguists and contortionists busy for years.
Clinton, who infamously complained to General Petraeus that only a “willing suspension of disbelief” would lead one to conclude the surge was working, says now that her assessment is still right and that that there is no justification that our troops “should remain beyond, you know, today.”
Obama, for his part, repeated the tired Demo mantra that “we have not made ourselves safer as a consequence” of OIF—which explains all the terrorist attacks on our soil since 9/11. He then insisted that the real reason for any success in Iraq is that “the Democrats were elected in 2006” —no doubt because the specter of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent chills up and down the spines of all those wonkish Sunni insurgents. (more…)