That is not the Iraq Withdrawal Plan that I Knew

Senator Obama came into this election desperately needing to find a way to grab a sizable piece of the democrat base from a living icon of the democrat party machine; Hillary Clinton.

It seemed a long shot at best. Sure he was young and certainly liberal enough; he gave a great speech back in 2004, but he was planning to lock horns with the Clintons. No small task for the neophyte liberal from Chicago.

But he had a wildcard and he knew how to play it without looking like a Kucinich.

Hillary Clinton voted for the authorization to use force in Iraq and Obama did not. She tried to lie her way around that but couldn’t. Obama wasn’t even in the Senate when that vote was taken but he did speak out against the war.

Obama also knew that a huge number among the democrat base are neurologically anti-war and he played these dolts like a fiddle. His claim was always being more anti-war than Hillary and screaming for immediate withdrawal (though impossible) resonated better with this crowd than Hillary’s less catastrophic phased redeployment plan.

From www.barackobama.com/issues/iraq:

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. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. 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.

That sounds pretty definitive to me. Obama becomes president in January 2009 and there will be zero combat brigades in Iraq in May 2010, right?

Not so fast there scooter, this week we got yet another dose of “Change”.

“I’ve always said that the pace of withdrawal would be dictated by the safety and security of our troops and the need to maintain stability. That assessment has not changed,” he said. “And when I go to Iraq and have a chance to talk to some of the commanders on the ground, I’m sure I’ll have more information and will continue to refine my policies.”

Refine my policies? Read that as: “Of course I’m not going to start pulling troops out while we’re winning. That would be recklessly stupid. I just said that timetable thing so the idiots in Hollywood and the brainless college students would vote for me. And it worked!”

Category: Politics