Obama’s “No”

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In an interview yesterday with Senator Obama, ABC’s Terry Moran listed just a few of the by now seemingly endless data points demonstrating that the so-called surge, which Obama opposed at the time it was announced, is a success. Moran then asked this (excellent) question: Knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?”

Obama’s answer was, “No.”

That Obama opposed the surge is bad enough — but that opposition was not itself irresponsible or unforgiveable. It was understandable, if in retrospect quite wrong, to believe that Iraq, caught in an apparent death spiral in the latter half of 2006, was unsalvageable. Critics of the surge argued that we were sending American troops to die in a lost cause.

It turned out that Iraq was redeemable and that the President’s strategy, brilliantly executed by General Petraeus and the American military, worked faster and better than anyone thought possible. To say that he would oppose a military plan that one day may well rank as among the best in our history is stunning.

Whatever would motivate Obama to say what he did — political cowardice, willful denial, astonishing blindness to the facts, or the mindset of an ideologue — it ought to cause Americans to rethink, in the most fundamental way, whether Obama is responsible enough to be President...

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