A big difference between Obama and McCain (or, why McCain is so wrong about the Anbar Awakening)

Here is a major difference between Obama and McCain, one that just makes McCain seem even more like Bush.

When Obama makes a gaff:

Barack Obama today boasted about a bill in “my committee,” a committee on which he has no seat….

During the press conference, Obama said, “Just this past — this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.”

He admits he flubbed up and gives a reasonable explanation of what he was trying to say:

“[Obama] meant to say ‘my bill,’”

Reasonable enough gaff to make, and the correction clearly makes sense in the sentence.  Fair enough.

However, when McCain makes a gaff, he keeps spinning and spinning and spinning in order to never admit he ever made a mistake, such as his mistake in a CBS news interview where he said:

Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.

Except, of course, it isn’t.

Now, instead of giving up and admitting his mistake, McCain is now arguing that the surge started working, even a month before it was even announced:

McCain says U.S. Col. Sean MacFarland started carrying out elements of a new counterinsurgency strategy as early as December 2006.

Except the surge wasn’t even announced until January 2007 and Colonel MacFarland was talking about the “Awakening” (even if it wasn’t called that yet) back in September 2006.

So, according to McCain, an event that started in September 2006 was started by a change in startegy which started to be implemented in December 2006 – a strategy which wasn’t even announced until January 2007.

Now, it is, of course, plausible that some parts of the new strategy were implemented before the surge was announced, but troops definitely didn’t start arriving in Iraq until the end of January, so even if McCain wants to argue this point, he’s still admiting that additional troops – the defining characteristic of the surge – had nothing to do with it, despite his previous statement.

And to top it all off, the sheiks McCain referenced was assassinated after the surge started.

So not only did the surge, which hadn’t even started yet, prompt the sheik to come forward, but when the surge actually did begin, it wasn’t good enough to keep him from getting assassinated.  Doesn’t this just show that McCain is not only wrong, but that reality actually completely backwards from what he states it to be?

McCain: Obama flip-flops on genocide

How you can flip-flop on genocide, I’m not sure, but that’s McCain’s newest jumping-the-shark attack:

Obama on Genocide

Obama today at Yad Vashem:

“Let our children come here and know this history so they can add their voices to proclaim ‘never again.’ And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims but also as individuals who hoped and loved and dreamed like us and who have become symbols of the human spirit.”

Obama on July 20, 2007:

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Of course, Obama is right. It has never been the policy of the US to unilaterally use troops to deter or stop a genocidal situation. One can argue whether we should or not, but we don’t, and it probably isn’t McCain’s position either, unless he supports sending a few hundred-thousand troops into Sudan and the Congo and whether he supported unilaterally sending in troops to Rwanda before and wherever else genocide might be taking place in the future.

The second problem with McCain’s attack is that the only reason why we might have a genocidal situation in the first place is because we invaded. Before we invaded, we had the no fly zones and such, which pretty much prevented Saddam from going after the Kurds and the shias. One should also note that much of the reduction of violence in Iraq is due to the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods.

The third problem with McCain’s position is that, if he believes that pulling out of Iraq may lead to Genocide, how can we ever leave Iraq?

The Problem with the Press Listening to “Commanders on the Ground”

The press seems to have latched on to General Petraeus as a “commander on the ground” who opposes Obama’s plan as a sort of counter-weight to Maliki supporting Obama’s Iraq plan and is using him to try to show that Obama wouldn’t listen to “commanders on the ground” despite what he says.

There are several problems with this argument, however.

The first is ignorance, possibly willfully, about the difference between strategy and tactics and what the job of a general is.  It is the President’s job to set strategy, and it is the general’s job to implement it.  The President is the Commander-in-Chief meaning he has the final say.  Does he listen to his generals to get input on what the strategy should be?  Sure, and Obama said that he would take their advice into consideration, but he is, to borrow a Bush phrase, the decider.  If we just did whatever the top military man thought was right, we’d made them the commander-in-chief, but we didn’t.

The second is that the military is not some unitary monolithic thing where everyone thinks the same.  If you can find one general who believes on thing, you can probably find another general who thinks the opposite, so finding a general who support’s Bush’s position isn’t exactly a sign that all the commanders on the ground agree with Bush.

The third item deals with General Petraeus himself, and the fact that Bush appointed him to replace General Casey in overseeing the Iraq War for the very reason that he supports the surge and Casey did not.  In this light, Petraeus hardly holds an unbiased and objective opinion in the matter as his support for the surge is the reason why he holds the position that he does.

If he didn’t support the surge, Bush would have just replaced him with someone who did.  In that sense, one can’t really take the words of the top commanders at face value in a political campaign over what should be done with Iraq, since those commanders are in their positions for the very reason that they support the current administration’s (and presumably that party’s presidential candidate’s) position.

As a result, what commanders think we should do shouldn’t really be a part of the political dicussion because, despite what the press would like us to believe, they are not unbiased actors in the debate.