David Gregory interviewed Rudy Giuliani on Today to ask about Barack Obama’s odd construction on the surge. Noting that Obama has acknowledged the success of the surge, Gregory asks Giuliani what to make of Obama’s insistence that he wouldn’t support it even if he knew in advance that it would succeed. Giuliani is as mystified as the rest of us:
David Gregory: “Let me turn to Iraq this morning. A lot of news, Senator Obama’s trip and he said late last night that if he had it to do again, he would not support the support troop surge in Iraq. McCain has already been critical about that, what do you think that should say to voters about his view of the war and his judgment?”
Rudy Giuliani: “I don’t understand what Senator Obama is saying. He goes to Iraq to go on a fact-finding mission and the facts that he finds are that violence is down 70 to 80%. That everyone believes, particularly the military commanders he’s talking to, that it was a great success. The only reason al-Maliki is talking about a possible withdrawal in 2010 is because the surge has worked — couldn’t possibly be talking about something like that and we don’t know if it will happen or not depending on the facts on the ground. So I think it either indicates that Senator Obama is not on a fact-finding mission, because the facts don’t seem to affect him or Senator Obama has a stubbornness of wanting to stick to his political position which now turns out to be incorrect. The position he took a year ago to oppose the surge would have left us with a great loss and a Middle East in chaos right now. The position that was the correct one, that turned out historically to be correct, is the position that we should have done the surge.”
Gregory: “But let’s take on this argument a little bit, because Mr. Mayor, as you know, Senator McCain has effectively chalked up Obama’s position on Iraq to naivete. That he has effectively called for surrender, and yet by sticking to the idea of a 16-month phased withdrawal from Iraq that has ultimately been validated by the Iraqi Prime Minister, hasn’t that effectively refuted that argument?”
Giuliani: “Of course not. You wouldn’t be there if the surge didn’t work — unless, he wanted to pull out the troops in the midst of chaos. Unless, you wanted to create civil war in Iraq. These are the facts that Senator Obama ignored a year ago. It now turns out that had you not had the surge, either we would be in a much worse situation in Iraq or as the Democrats and Harry Reid and Obama wanted to do, we would have declared we lost and pulled out.”
Of course, this makes sense only if a candidate has wedded himself so closely to a position that he cannot admit he got it wrong — and that describes perfectly the conundrum in which Obama finds himself on Iraq. Despite the significant improvements in Iraq, despite the stability and political reconciliation that has taken place and is still in motion, Obama cannot admit that he got this call wrong. To do so would be to admit that had Obama been in charge of the effort in 2007, America would have lost the war unnecessarily and given a gift win to terrorists and militias throughout Iraq — as well as the nation’s oil resources.
Obama’s trip to Iraq put him in this vise. Politically, he cannot move away from the anti-war Left that refuses to see any progress in Iraq, especially after betraying them on FISA reform. That explains Bill Richardson’s assertion that the trip isn’t about fact-finding — because acknowledging the facts on the ground would force him into a change. Today, they’re calling the Obama foreign tour a “listening” event, but Obama isn’t listening to commanders on the ground in Iraq. He simply can’t afford to do so.
One point struck me from the Veterans for McCain event yesterday. Col. Leo Thorsness talked about John McCain’s willingness to admit he held the wrong position and to listen to advice, even offered in an adversarial manner. He admitted that he miscalculated on border security, for instance, and he also admitted that he initially made the wrong call on the last of the Bush tax cuts — changing his mind later because they obviously worked, although he still wanted spending cuts to accompany them.
Barack Obama has changed positions a number of times in this campaign but never admitted that any of them were changes or that he was incorrect in his initial analyses. He has a brittle intellect, close-minded to the point of being obtuse — as in this example here. How can anyone expect to be taken seriously when they insist that they would have followed a path to defeat in retrospect rather than admit he was wrong and take the path to victory? Does Obama put saving face above the interests of the nation? Vero possumus.
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