War, Democrat style

Barack Obama on “the war we need to win.” As is almost always the case with Democrats, it’s a war other than the one we’re fighting and (to the extent that Obama is really talking about war) it would involve taking military action in a country — Pakistan — that has been our ally in the fight against terrorism, at least to some degree.
It’s also a war that no one can reasonably believe Obama would initiate. Note tha, while he has sponsored a resolution to give up in Iraq thus handing al Qaeda victory there, he has sponsored no resolution to send troops into Pakistan. In fact, even his speech is ambiguous on whether he would send a substantial force there. The deployment of significant troop levels is what folks ordinarily mean by “war,” but perhaps Obama means war in the Bill Clinton sense — lob a few missiles at a suspected hide-out.
In sum, this is your standard Democratic attempt to sound tough while effectively advocating defeat in Iraq and ignoring the mounting threat posed by Iran. Obama is smart enough to know that his speech is nonsense. But the fact that he would indugle in this sort of posturing should disqualify him from the presidency.
JOHN adds: Obama’s statements remind me very much of John Kerry in the 2004 campaign, when he kept saying that Iraq was the “wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time.” This implied, of course, that there was some other war–the right one–that Kerry would support fighting. But no one believed that; Kerry’s willingness to fight any war anywhere, like Obama’s, was entirely theoretical. At the time, I thought that if Kerry had been serious, and if he meant to say that we should be fighting Iran rather than Iraq, he may have had a point. But of course that wouldn’t have been the “right” war either.

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