Obama Demonstrated Failure of Bush Policies Along with Hypocrisy of Conservatives

Yesterday I discussed Barack Obama’s speech at the Wilson Center, including the knee jerk opposition from conservatives who we could be certain would be supportive if the same comments on Pakistan had come from George Bush. Matthew Yglesias places this in perspective in The Guardian. He notes tha there is much less to this than is claimed by opponents who mischaracterize his statements as a threat to invade Pakistan, while also demonstrating why Bush’s policies against terrorism have been such a terrible failure:

Bold. Tough. But there’s probably less to it than meets the eye. No president would categorically rule out such action, but any president would need to think very carefully about the consequences. Accusing the incumbent of insufficient boldness in this regard is precisely what one expects from a challenger, but the need to actually make the decisions tends to instill a certain caution – even in George W. Bush.

More interesting is that Obama, unlike some of the reporters who covered the speech, refused to frame his determination to fight al-Qaida as a contrast with his dovish views on Iraq. Rather, he recalled that in the fall of 2002 he “said I could not support ‘a dumb war, a rash war’ in Iraq. I worried about a ‘US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences’ in the heart of the Muslim world. I pleaded that we ‘finish the fight with [Osama] bin Laden and al-Qaida.'”

Today, he says that “by refusing the end the war in Iraq, President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want, and what the Congress voted to give then in 2002: a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” Opposition to the war in Iraq, then and now, in other words, is part and parcel of a commitment to a serious struggle against al-Qaida.

This is precisely right, and it’s precisely Obama’s ability to move the conversation in this direction that’s his campaign’s most underappreciated asset. It’s not just that Clinton took a different position on the authorization vote four and a half years ago. Rather, Obama, having established more space between his views and those of the Republicans can, in effect, punch much harder, accusing conservatives of radically misconceiving the problem.

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