It is nice to see Senator Obama coming in for criticism over his continued adherence to an arbitrary timetable for the removal of our troops from Iraq. My pleasure exists on two levels.
First, I think a public exclamation of a timetable simply gives the miscreants seeking to overthrow the Iraqi government a date after which they can operate with impunity. By saying we'll leave on this or that date, they simply head off into hiding for a bit, only to pop up again when we leave. Should we privately have timetables by which we ratchet up the pressure on the Maliki government? Absolutely. But keep it quiet.
Secondly, the Post's editorial gets at something I wrote about last week, which is questioning Senator Obama's widely heralded good judgment, when in point of fact, his lack of support for the surge has turned out to be just as wrong-headed as any who believed that we'd have a cakewalk in Iraq. While the Senator (from the relatively anonymous position of representing Hyde Park in the Illinois State Legislature) did not support the war, his recent pronouncements in opposition to the surge from the well of the US Senate and elsewhere bring his judgment seriously into question.
I doesn't matter that he was wrong about the surge. He was right once in questioning the war in Iraq. That single instance established his bona fides for having perrenially sound judgement. He can be wrong about anything else, but because he was right just that once...the opposite holds true for President Bush by the way.
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