Mona Charen: Obama Owes Bush an Apology
[Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.]
Had it not been for opposing war, President Obama might never have been catapulted to the White House.
It was taken for granted in the run-up to the presidential campaign of 2008 that candidate Obama had principled objections to the war in Iraq. He was the Left’s champion against Sen. Hillary Clinton, who had — along with 29 of the then 50 Democratic senators — voted in favor of the Iraq War resolution. That vote was to dog her throughout the Democratic primaries.
Though Obama was only a state legislator in 2002, he gave a highly partisan antiwar speech that improved his standing with the left wing of the Democratic party. “What I am opposed to,” he declaimed, “is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.” When the war began to go badly in 2006 and 2007, Obama was hailed as prescient.
After winning the nomination, Obama reiterated his opposition to the war in Iraq, which he claimed had been poorly led, unnecessary, badly motivated, and doomed to failure.
In a March 2007 Senate floor speech, Senator Obama recited the leftist litany about Iraq. It was folly, he argued, to “go it alone” — overlooking the fact that 27 nations participated in the coalition to remove Saddam Hussein. Obama repeated the common liberal trope of the time that only a political settlement would end the violence. “There is no military solution to this war,” he pronounced.
When President Bush announced the troop surge in January 2007, Senator Obama opposed it, saying, “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” Even a year later, when evidence mounted that the surge was working, Senator Obama continued to push for retreat (“phased redeployment”) and again expressed his doubts about the prospects for President Bush's strategy.
Only in mid-July of 2008 did the Obama campaign scrub criticism of the surge from its website.
By turning to the architect of the Iraq surge, Gen. David Petraeus, to save the war in Afghanistan, President Obama is acknowledging — if only implicitly — that he was quite wrong about the Iraq surge and that President Bush was right.
But what remains of the rest of his critique about President Bush’s war in Iraq?..
Read entire article at National Review
Had it not been for opposing war, President Obama might never have been catapulted to the White House.
It was taken for granted in the run-up to the presidential campaign of 2008 that candidate Obama had principled objections to the war in Iraq. He was the Left’s champion against Sen. Hillary Clinton, who had — along with 29 of the then 50 Democratic senators — voted in favor of the Iraq War resolution. That vote was to dog her throughout the Democratic primaries.
Though Obama was only a state legislator in 2002, he gave a highly partisan antiwar speech that improved his standing with the left wing of the Democratic party. “What I am opposed to,” he declaimed, “is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.” When the war began to go badly in 2006 and 2007, Obama was hailed as prescient.
After winning the nomination, Obama reiterated his opposition to the war in Iraq, which he claimed had been poorly led, unnecessary, badly motivated, and doomed to failure.
In a March 2007 Senate floor speech, Senator Obama recited the leftist litany about Iraq. It was folly, he argued, to “go it alone” — overlooking the fact that 27 nations participated in the coalition to remove Saddam Hussein. Obama repeated the common liberal trope of the time that only a political settlement would end the violence. “There is no military solution to this war,” he pronounced.
When President Bush announced the troop surge in January 2007, Senator Obama opposed it, saying, “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” Even a year later, when evidence mounted that the surge was working, Senator Obama continued to push for retreat (“phased redeployment”) and again expressed his doubts about the prospects for President Bush's strategy.
Only in mid-July of 2008 did the Obama campaign scrub criticism of the surge from its website.
By turning to the architect of the Iraq surge, Gen. David Petraeus, to save the war in Afghanistan, President Obama is acknowledging — if only implicitly — that he was quite wrong about the Iraq surge and that President Bush was right.
But what remains of the rest of his critique about President Bush’s war in Iraq?..