Subscribe by RSSMcCain: Obama is “inexperienced” on Iraq War, Foreign Policy - Updated
The back and forth today in the press between McCain and Obama over comments concerning how long troops would remain in Iraq and which candidate has more experience on the topic became pretty direct. McCain came out swinging basically saying Obama is completely inexperienced in this area.
Here’s the report on it from Fox News:
John McCain, fighting back against what he says are Barack Obama’s distortions of his position on Iraq, turned the tables on his potential Democratic opponent Tuesday by asking Obama to explain his plans for a “strike force” in the area.
Obama has campaigned vigorously on his pledge to pull troops from Iraq. On Monday, he said he wouldn’t abandon the Mideast in the process of ordering a withdrawal.
“What I said was I would have a strike force in the region, perhaps in Iraq, perhaps outside Iraq so we could take advantage of or we could deal with potential problems that might take place in the region,” Obama said. “That’s very different from saying we’d have a permanent occupation in Iraq. And it’s certainly different from saying we would have a high level of combat troops inside Iraq for a decade or two decades or, as John McCain said, perhaps 100 years.”
McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, responded Tuesday that he’d like to know how many troops make up a “strike force.”
“Where are they based? What do they do? Now I’m intrigued. He has said he will pull out all troops before. How do you reconcile those two?” McCain asked.
McCain and Obama have been sparring for weeks over a continued U.S. presence in Iraq. McCain has said he would be OK with the U.S. maintaining troops in Iraq for 100 years. Obama has portrayed those remarks as saying McCain is willing to wage war in Iraq for 100 years.
In what appears more and more like discussion between two nominees as opposed to candidates for their respective parties, this debate over Iraq is sure to continue and take shape in the coming months. Obama is now taking hits from McCain and Clinton on the topic of foreign policy experience and he still has a couple debates to answer questions on the topic.
I’ll have some more later along with the video of the two going at each other.
Update
Video of McCain speaking about Obama:
This from Fox News:
Washington, D.C. — Sen. John McCain slammed Sen. Barack Obama Monday after the IL Senator again alleged that McCain is willing to wage a 100-year war in Iraq.
“In all due respect he does not understand…the fundamental elements of national security and warfare,” McCain told reporters aboard his plane during a flight to the Washington area, where he is set to deliver a speech at his high school in Alexandria, VA on Tuesday.
Obama has been hammering McCain for comments he made at a January town hall meeting where the AZ Senator said he would be comfortable with a century-long U.S. troop presence in Iraq. While McCain was alluding a peace-time military force, Democrats have used the comments to make the case that McCain is willing to fight a 100 year war in Iraq.
Also, here’s video of Obama taking some questions on the topic:
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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You know, with all due respect, Obama has a stuttering problem, doesn’t he?
Factcheck.org investigated this very incident (and others), and seems to have found the attacks against McCain on this subject are not just a misquote, but a planned strategy by the DNC to Take McCain out. They’ve done a very thorough job of analyzing a letter sent out by Howard Dean the day after Super Tuesday when John McCain emerged the presumptive republican nominee. The letter was very detailed in its strategy, and I would recommend the investigation from factcheck.org to be read by anyone interested in the facts. What Obama is doing is simply implementing Howard Dean’s strategy.
http://www.factcheck.org/.....eared.html
I think Obama does have a stuterring problem especially when hes wrong or when someoone puts him on the spot like that reporter did. Either way Obama was quoted for saying ” Stop with the attack politics” THAT IS RIDICULOUS! OBAMA IS THE ONE THAT ATTACKS PEOPLE BUT THAN ACTS AS IF HE GETS ATTACKED. the man is a lying asshole. GO MCCAIN
I think Obama had a very good response to this - initially I really had felt like he had been taking McCain’s words out of context to basically use as a smear against him. But he’s right - McCain may not having been talking about 100 years of war, but he’s talking about 100 years in Iraq, whatever that may mean or cost. He doesn’t say how many of those 100 years will be war years, but assumably they will be years of war until the war has been won.
And he may be lacking in McCain’s experience, but I think he’s also right in saying that the government doesn’t seem to have a clear idea of what our victory conditions should be right now, or what “winning” actually looks like, let alone how to work toward it with anything but guns. Unfortunately guns don’t rebuild a country.
How and when would McCain declare victory? I’d like to believe in him, but he needs to lay out his vision. Otherwise his vision is just one of stubbornness.
Indiminded, I agree with you that “the government” doesn’t seem to have a clear idea of what “winning” is. Short of an absolute surrender the “winning” line will be a fine one and difficult to see. The problem is, that all three candidates are a part of that “government”, and Obama will no more be able to define victory than McCain. Wars are actions and reactions, and impossible to predict. It would be nice to know every move the opposition will make next, but we don’t. And in absence of that, to even try to predict victory would be reckless campaign rhetoric.
Did Obama ever answer McCain’s direct questions yesterday? These questions?
“McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, responded Tuesday that he’d like to know how many troops make up a “strike force.”
“Where are they based? What do they do? Now I’m intrigued. He has said he will pull out all troops before. How do you reconcile those two?” McCain asked.”
I’d like to hear his answers, wouldn’t you?
I would, it sounds like McCain directly challenged him to expand upon his ideas there. I’m not sure Obama is ready to do that, especially given his response to the news reporters it sounds like he may have been more or less backing off of his “strike force” idea. But we’ll have to wait and see if he responds to that challenge. It could be interesting, or he may just ignore it.
But so far as “winning” goes, I think that’s not so much at issue for either of the democratic candidates. Sad as it is, I think it’s fairly obvious that what both of them propose is not winning. It’s packing up our bags, apologizing to the Iraqi people for what we can’t undo, bringing our men and women home, and hoping the Iraqi people can put their nation back together without our military support.
We owe the Iraqi people more, and it would be a mark of shame in America’s history books for us to leave a country in such disarray that we’ve created. But if we have no strategy for winning - if we can’t even figure out what a win would look like after so long - I think we need to consider it. When we went in Rumsfeld was predicting we’d be there a matter of months if I recall? Now we don’t even know what victory would be.
Yes, Rumsfield did predict that, and I think his prediction brought a lot of support for the war that might otherwise not have been there. My opinion is that when we went in with the “shock and awe” most Americans, including myself, felt somewhat vindicated for the attacks of 9/11, problem is we opened a can of worms against terrorism without really (maybe) knowing that it’s a neverending battle to wipe it out. I’m with you, at this point pulling out is not the answer, but we do need an answer. I think McCain is also holding some of his cards close to his vest on his strategy. He said as much in an interview a few weeks ago, and I respect that, because I think his reasoning for not expounding on some things is a security reason, whereas I’m afraid Obama’s reasoning is simply that none of his staff has done enough research to give him any good answers yet. This is an area where Obama’s inexperience could cost him the election again McCain. And the 100 year quip is only going to work for so long, it’s already gotten very old, in fact.
Babs,
You make a very good point regarding strategy and secrecy. To let your enemy know your plans is akin to suicide. It is very dangerous and results in more American deaths. A timeline is a countdown to defeat.
You know, the thing about the 100 year quip is that it does seem sort of cheap - it wasn’t exactly what he was saying and it hits on a sore spot. But what he was saying does directly imply what Obama’s saying it does. It may get old, but for the sake of his candidacy, I think McCain needs to be put on the hot seat on this issue.
It may be suicide to let your enemy know your plans, but I’ve sat through years of the Bush administration telling us “oh we’ve got a plan. And it’s working. Don’t worry, we’ve got Iraq under control. We’re turning a corner”. And for years it hasn’t been true.
I really don’t want to call this a failure, but I’m sure not voting for someone who plans to win but isn’t willing to put forth a plan for success - and tell it to the voters. So I’m glad that Obama wants to discuss this issue in depth, and McCain should be too. Because if he’s going to win he’s also going to need to talk about exactly this issue. It’s the crux of his campaign. But what bothers me that the reason Obama wishes to discuss this topic in depth may be that he believes John McCain may not.
And if McCain isn’t interested in discussing it in much depth, that’s going to deliver a pretty clear message to the voters as well. Obama would have to figure out the best way to exit as gracefully from this mess as we can - no simple task. But that’s much easier than finding a way to solve this problem we haven’t even figured out how to tackle yet.
McCain is talking about little else in depth, it’s one of his major issues he talks about almost constantly. And he has reiterated his point on the 100 year quip time and again.
When does Obama want to discuss this issue in depth? He hasn’t started yet. He hasn’t - that I can find - even answered the simple questions McCain put to him yesterday that we’ve already discussed.
Again, the 100 year quip is a campaign strategy put forth by Howard Dean in the email he sent out after Super Tuesday. That email closed with:
“I don’t just want to beat John McCain - I want it to be a landslide. … Only the Democratic Party is legally allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money to back our nominee and tell the real story about John McCain. We proved that our strategy worked in 2006, and it will work again this fall. … Let’s get going,
Howard Dean”
The 100 year quip is not the only smear campaign outlined in the email, either. It’s not even the most false. Follow the link I gave in my first post, and then watch for the other directives to come out of Obama’s mouth.