Barack Obama always opposed our presence in Iraq - except when he supported it

The Audacity of Hype has a bad day even when winning states (Wyoming).

The Boston Globe and the New York Times (h/t Weekly Standard Blog) have discovered that Senator Obama once held a decidedly different view on the presence of American forces in Iraq than he holds today.

Here’s the Globe:

In July of 2004, the day after his speech at the Democratic convention catapulted him into the national spotlight, Barack Obama told a group of reporters in Boston that the United States had an “absolute obligation” to remain in Iraq long enough to make it a success.

“The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster,” he said at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, according to an audiotape of the session. “It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died. . . . It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective.”

If that’s not bad enough, check out what the Times found (emphasis added):

He voted against the withdrawal of troops and proposed legislation calling for a drawdown only after he was running for president and polls showed voters favoring it.

I guess Obama’s supporters will have to wait until another version of themselves comes along.

More to the point, it is now clear that at one point, all of the three remaining candidates for President understood the need for America to win in Iraq.  Two of them (Clinton and Obama) have buckled under political pressure.  Only one - John McCain - had the strength to defend the mission (even as he criticized, rightly, its implementation) and refuse to sacrifice American security for political gain.

That’s something I hope the American people will remember when the time comes.