Flip-flop is not the point
EJ Dionne has an interesting piece on the Obama Iraq flip-flop. Dionne says: “voters know that John McCain is far more likely than Barack Obama to continue the war in Iraq indefinitely. Obama would be foolish to blur that distinction.” But in making his argument, he raises the interesting question of what it is that Senator Obama actually believes at this moment in time, and what concrete actions he would take as President. First, an excerpt:
When a candidate calls a second news conference to say the same thing he thought he said in the first one, you know he knows he has a problem. Thus Barack Obama’s twin news conferences last week in Fargo, N.D. At his first, Obama promised he would make a “thorough assessment” of his Iraq policy in his coming visit there and “continue to gather information” to “make sure that our troops are safe, and that Iraq is stable.”
You might ask: What’s wrong with that? A commander in chief willing to adjust his view to facts and realities should be a refreshing idea. But when news reports suggested Obama was backing away from his commitment to withdrawing troops from Iraq in 16 months, Obama’s lieutenants no doubt heard echoes of those cries of “flip-flop” that rocked the 2004 Republican National Convention and proved devastating to John Kerry.
So out Obama came again to reiterate his timeline. “Apparently, I wasn’t clear enough this morning on my position with respect to the war in Iraq,” he said. “I intend to end this war. My first day in office I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war — responsibly, deliberately, but decisively.”
The unsteady moment suggested that Obama has not figured out how to slip the trap John McCain’s campaign is trying to set for him…The flip-flop charge may be of limited use to the GOP this year because McCain has changed his own positions rather promiscuously…
Dionne assumes that Senator Obama is genuinely anti-war, and that appears true, as well as having the additional merit of having been politically very useful in his Chicago environs, “one of the most liberal districts in Illinois encompassing Chicago’s lake front, Hyde Park, the University of Chicago and African American neighborhoods in the southern half of the district.”
What then should one make of Obama’s new commitment to make sure that “Iraq is stable”? Some conservative commentators suggest that there is no way that a Democratic President would saddle his administration with a strategic defeat in Iraq, and maybe that is so. But the commitment contained in “I intend to end this war” does not suggest that victory is desirable or even an option. Perhaps Senator Obama really does know, deep down, what he would do on January 21, 2009. But he sure has not made it clear, and his goals are internally contradictory. That’s quite a bit worse than a flip-flop.