The boy-candidate has changed his mind again.
For the second third fourth umpteenth time in a week, Barack Obama has shifted his view of how long American forces must stay in Iraq. His latest position “articulated” Saturday in an interview with Newsweek parrots the long-held positions of the Bush administration and of rival John McCain: forever.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said in an interview published on Saturday the size of a residual U.S. force left in Iraq after the withdrawal of combat troops would be “entirely conditions-based.” [Reuters]
This will not sit well with the Code Pink and the rest of the “surrender at any cost” crowd. It does sit well with the McCain campaign as the latest demonstration of Obama’s infantile understanding of how the world actually works–the very world in which claims citizenship and allegiance before and above his American citizenship.
“We welcome this latest shift in Senator Obama’s position, but it is obvious that it was only a lack of experience and judgment that kept him from arriving at this position sooner,” the campaign said in a statement.
McCain, like U.S. President George W. Bush, has opposed a fixed schedule for withdrawing combat troops, preferring to remain until Iraq is fully secure.
Barack told Fox News that his trip confirmed his views on foreign policy, apparently meaning that he never had any. Former UN Ambassador John Bolton agrees:
If that is what the senator thought he was doing, he still has a lot to learn about both foreign policy and the views of the American people. Although well received in the Tiergarten, the Obama speech actually reveals an even more naive view of the world than we had previously been treated to in the United States. In addition, although most of the speech was substantively as content-free as his other campaign pronouncements, when substance did slip in, it was truly radical, from an American perspective. [Bolton in LA Times]
The media, which supports the Obama campaign with millions of dollars in donations, has pronounced Obama’s pretentious trip the final procession in his coronation as Lord Sovereign of the United States. Time will tell. For those of us who, like Bolton, lived through or bothered to learn about the Cold War, Obama’s actions and words abroad revealed a man less ready to be President than to begin freshman studies of history at a community college.
UPATE: Allahpundit is having fun with this, too.