In an earlier post, I endorsed Barack Obama as the best choice for Democratic nominee, but that doesn’t mean I think he should be president. The two most important issues for me are the economy (which I’ll address in a later post) and the War against Militant Islamism, and the most important part of the war is Iraq. I have serious problems with Obama’s "plan" and statements and political record on the subject. In last Tuesday’s debate, Obama brought up the familiar refrain about judgment and the choice to go to war in the first place. Quote :

Well, Senator Clinton I think equates experience with longevity in Washington. I don't think the American people do and I don't think that if you look at the judgments that we've made over the last several years that that's the accurate measure. On the most important foreign policy decision that we face in a generation -- whether or not to go into Iraq -- I was very clear as to why we should not -- that it would fan the flames of anti-American sentiment -- that it would distract us from Afghanistan -- that it would cost us billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and would not make us more safe, and I do not believe it has made us more safe.

Obama’s brilliant answer killed a flock of birds with one stone: He differentiated himself from an opponent where there is little real daylight between the two, he made clear that his opinions are more closely aligned with the party base, and he successfully skirted around the fact that he is a freshman Senator with basically two years of legislative experience on the national stage. Most importantly, he successfully diverted the discussion away from his judgment on an issue of equal (if not greater) importance: Whether to draw down our troops or make a fundamental change in the strategy. In January 2007, during Iraq’s darkest hour, Obama was clearly against the surge strategy .

Meanwhile, Obama said he told the president directly that an "escalation of troop levels in Iraq was a mistake." Obama was among more than a dozen senators of both parties who were invited to the White House to discuss his plans for Iraq. Bush plans to continue to meet with lawmakers and is expected to announce his new Iraq strategy next week in an address to the nation. "It was an open-ended discussion," Obama told reporters after the meeting. "The president asked for our opinions. I think both Republican and Democratic senators expressed grave concern about the situation in Iraq. I personally indicated that an escalation of troop levels in Iraq was a mistake and that we need a political accommodation, rather than a military approach to the sectarian violence there," said Obama.

Obama’s comment betrayed a lack of understanding of what the strategy was really about, because the whole point of the COIN strategy is to create an environment where insurgents will choose to resolve differences through the political process rather than by violence. Either that or he was being less than honest. Obama had the chance to further examine Petraeus' strategy, and in hypocritical fashion, Obama voted “yea” in confirming Petraeus to four-star general yet four days later he introduced process-oriented legislation that would gut the Petraeus plan.

Wanting to learn a little more, I checked his campaign website and was even more disappointed, starting with this sentence:

At great cost, our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006.

The statement is flatly and factually false, as seen in the graphs below (hat tip to Engram for the graphs).

Suicide bombings—which are the exclusive province of al Qaeda—killed 213 of 566 civilians last month, or 38% of the total, and al Qaeda was responsible for 291 killings or 51% of the total. Despite comparatively small numbers, they remain lethal. Shiite hit squads are also a problem. There were 97 extra-judicial killings last month, meaning that these groups hunted down military-age Sunni males and killed them execution-style. But basically, there are 1,000 fewer civilian deaths per month under the current surge strategy. Under the Obama “plan”, there is every reason to believe civilian casualties would have looked like this.

Why? Because going by Obama’s proposed legislation, his “plan” called for unilateral troop draw downs during a time when terrorist attacks and extra-judicial killings were raging. Of course, the trend lines are arguable, but the conclusions in the April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate are not, which said:

The Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

It couldn’t be clearer to me that the McCain/Petraeus plan has made significant strides in convincing jihadists that they are failing in Iraq. Obama’s so-called plan, which called for cutting and running when suicide bombings were peaking,

would have signaled our defeat at the hands of these terrorists. Obama’s short-sightedness on troop withdrawals would likely have inspired al Qaeda & Co. to carry on the fight, using Iraq as a propaganda tool for recruiting more terrorists into their fold. I am convinced that there would be more militant Islamists today if Obama got what he wanted back in January 2007. Then there’s his next sentence, which is a whopper:

Moreover, Iraq's political leaders have made no progress in resolving the political differences at the heart of their civil war.

Muqtada al-Sadr is a political leader, and he stood down his JAM militias last August and he recently extended his ceasefire. That's political progress. Although progress has been halting , political leaders in the national government have made significant strides at resolving political differences. Although no oil revenue sharing bill has passed, political leaders have set up a system for sharing oil revenues. When Sunni tribal sheiks joined the coalition and turned their collective backs on al Qaeda, political progress was made. Obviously, much work remains to be done, the fact remains that Obama’s statement is outrageously untrue.

Also, it is arguable that there is a civil war in Iraq, but Obama and the Democratic Party continue to trot out this storyline. There are competing factions, to be sure, and those factions frequently resort to violence. But calling Iraq a civil war glosses over the actions of al Qaeda, whose primary goal is to foment a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, and they are failing in that endeavor. It ignores the fact that northern Iraq is stable. It ignores the fact that southern Iraq is virtually all Shiite and run by Shiites. It ignores the fact that Anbar province is virtually all Sunni and is run by Sunnis. The fact of the matter is that there are mixed Sunni-Shiite areas in Iraq, especially Baghdad, where sectarian violence has occurred and has sparked a refugee problem. Calling it a “civil war” is a matter of opinion, not fact, and that’s what Obama does all too often. He conveys opinions, giving the impression to impressionable voters that they are facts when they are really not. It is slickness reminiscent of Slick Willie himself. More from Obama’s campaign website:

As a candidate for the United States Senate in 2002, Obama put his political career on the line to oppose going to war in Iraq, and warned of “an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs, and undetermined consequences.”

Obama was not a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2002. He ran for a U.S. House seat in 2000 and lost, and in 2004, he resigned from the State Senate to run for the U.S. Senate. In 2002, Obama was running for reelection to the State Senate, a position he held since 1996. His district has a huge Democratic majority, so he was an incumbent with a safe seat; therefore it is ridiculous for him to claim that he put his career on the line. Obama continued this lie in last Tuesday’s debate when he said, “My objections to the war in Iraq were simply -- not simply a speech [referring to his October 2002 speech against invading Iraq]. I was in the midst of a U.S. Senate campaign.” Obama’s “career on the line” nonsense is under the section titled “judgment you can trust” on his website, which leads me this question: How can you trust a man’s judgment when you cannot justifiably trust his facts?

Again going by his campaign website, Obama believes the following:

Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.

This is troubling on multiple levels, first because Obama says not a word about strategy and tactics. It’s all about sending troops home, nothing about the situation on the ground. Second, Obama’s timeline conflicts with General Petraeus’ timeline. Finally, Obama's large and precipitous withdrawal conflicts with the latest National Intelligence Estimate , which says the following:

Coalition capabilities, including force levels, resources, and operations, remain an essential stabilizing element in Iraq. If Coalition forces were withdrawn rapidly during the term of this Estimate, we judge that this almost certainly would lead to a significant increase in the scale and scope of sectarian conflict in Iraq, intensify Sunni resistance to the Iraqi Government, and have adverse consequences for national reconciliation.

Obama’s logic is the exact opposite of the NIE, and he is on the wrong side of the issue. Finally, Obama's phased surrender plan conflicts with his own words in 2004 :

Now, us having gone in there, we have a deep national security interest in making certain that Iraq is stable. If not, not only are we going to have a humanitarian crisis, we are also going to have a huge national security problem on our hands-because, ironically, it has become a hotbed of terrorists as a consequence, in part, of our incursion there. In terms of timetable, I'm not somebody who can say with certainty that a year from now or six months from now we're going to be able to pull down troops.

Now his mantra is that, by leaving, reconciliation among Iraqis will happen and everything will get better, even though such significant withdrawals will likely destabilize the country, reintroduce chaos and reignite sectarian violence. The environment Obama seeks is the very same one which allowed al Qaeda to grow and fester. Here’s some more illogic:

He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.

Newsflash. Al Qaeda is in Iraq right now. They’re the ones responsible for 51% of civilian deaths last month, and they’re the ones who General Petraeus still considers our biggest challenge there. Obama’s statement makes no sense because it assumes that al Qaeda is already gone.

Obama also wants to “surge our diplomacy”. Another newsflash. It’s already happening. Ambassador Crocker is in Iraq, coordinating his efforts with General Petraeus and working constantly with the various Iraqi factions to help them achieve their political benchmarks.

Obama’s statements on Iraq lead me to believe that he would be a foreign policy disaster for America. If he gets his way, Iraq would destabilize, reversing all the hard-fought gains made and adversely affecting our national security. Even if you accept that he made the right judgment in 2002, his judgments in 2007 and 2008 on the surge strategy are more important because they are current and because losing in Iraq could have calamitous repercussions on our country. Vietnam was bad enough. As Tom Maguire notes , Obama is not running in 2002 and he’s not running against George W. Bush. The issue on the table is what Obama would do in Iraq today. To me, it looks like he'd rather surrender, no matter all the remarkable gains we've made since September.