True North

In his Examiner column "War and peace and the Democrats," Paul Mirengoff collects conflicting statements made by Barack Obama on his signature issue of Iraq. Paul's column cites and relies in part on Peter Wehner's Commentary article "Obama's war," but it distills and updates the evidence of Obama's extraordinary cynicism. Paul shows that, in a line headed by Bill Clinton and John Kerry, Obama has perfected the art of trimming on the most serious issue confronting the United States. Paul concludes with Obama on the surge:

The night President Bush announced it, Obama opined that nothing in the plan would “make a significant dent in the sectarian violence.” But after the surge accomplished this and more, Obama insisted that he had always known that adding troops would tamp down the violence. Anyone can be wrong about whether a military operation will succeed or fail, but an honest person cannot be wrong about whether he predicted success or failure.

Barack Obama insists, quite correctly, that his patriotism cannot be judged by whether he wears an American flag lapel pin. But it’s fair enough to measure a politician’s patriotism by whether his positions on crucial questions of war and peace are based on the national interest, not which election the politician has his eyes on. By this standard, recent Democratic presidential nominees, and especially Obama, do not fare well.

On Paul's concluding point, Jim Hoft has posed video of Katie Couric's interview with Obama in Iraq discussing the surge here. It is very striking.

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Cross-posted at Powerline.