RNC: In Case You Missed It

Fox News On Barack Obama's Inconsistencies OnIraq War

WASHINGTON, March 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is being issued by the Republican National Committee:

Fox News' James Rosen: "To hear Senator Obama tell it inFayetteville, the home of Fort Bragg, he has never wavered in his opposition to theIraq war.

It's true that Obama, speaking inChicago on October 2002, opposed the invasion ofIraq. But in public statements thereafter, the Illinois senator has occasionally cast himself as a supporter of President Bush's conduct of the war and has also been at times, far off the mark in his forecasts of how specific adjustments in tactics would affect the military situation on the ground.

Early on in the war, when American troops racked up a series of major victories, Obama, as he later admitted, started to harbor doubts about his initial posture against the war. When the invasion was finally launched and U.S. forces marched unimpeded throughBaghdad, Obama wrote in his memoir, the 'Audacity of Hope,' 'When I saw Saddam's statue topple and watched the president stand atop the USS Abraham Lincoln, a banner behind him proclaiming 'Mission Accomplished,' I began to suspect that I might have been wrong.'

During the 2004 Democratic Convention, Obama declined to criticize John Kerry for voting for the war saying, 'What would I have done? I don't know. What I know is that from my vantage point, the case was not made.' The next day, Obama told 'TheChicago Tribune,' 'There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage,' and that fall, Obama echoed the president, telling Charlie Rose, 'Once we go in, then we're committed,' and adding, 'We've got to do everything we can to stabilize the country to make it successful because we'll have too much at stake in theMiddle East.'

With the bombing of the golden dome mosque in Samarra, sectarian tensions inIraq boiled over, leading to intense and bloody fighting between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. American troops were often caught in the crosshairs, and violence inIraq spiraled seemingly out of control.

Thus, President Bush ordered the build-up or surge in U.S. troops which, when fully implemented by last June, helped reduce casualties among U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians by some 60 percent. But Obama predicted a completely opposite result telling Tim Russert on 'Meet The Press' 80 days earlier, 'We cannot through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that the situation is going to improve.'

Senator Obama's whole point in saying he has opposed theIraq war from the start is to cast himself as a more astute analyst of national security than Senator Hillary Clinton, his rival, who voted for the war. Yet a comparison of all 85 votes onIraq since Obama began serving in the Senate three years ago shows he and Mrs. Clinton differed only once, on the nomination of General George Casey, the top commander inIraq for nearly three years to become army chief of staff, a nomination which Obama, unlike Senator Clinton, supported..." (Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume," 3/19/08)

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SOURCE Republican National Committee

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Tags: ,POL,CPN,RNC-on-Obama-Iraq

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