July 15th, 2008 by Matt

As you would expect, Barack Obama’s Iraq op-ed in The New York Times yesterday resulted in a good amount of chatter from the blogosphere. Here’s a sampling of a few posts, ranging from supportive to full-blown enraged.

At Tapped, Tim Fernholz makes the argument that despite all the “flip-flopping” talk, Obama actually has the clearer plan of the two candidates. Despite the disproportionate (negative) media attention Obama is receiving, it’s McCain who has an “unclear strategy for staying in Iraq indefinitely”. Fernholz is mostly responding to John Judis, who thinks the media has a point about Obama’s flip-flop. Michael Cohen’s conclusion at Democracy Arsenal is that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds–unless you are running for President, in which case, it’s a requirement.”

James Joyner thinks Obama’s “new” plan is pretty much his old plan–which could still “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

At Commentary, Peter Wehner says there is more than enough in Obama’s resistance to the surge, his overall assessment of the war, and his refusal to accept our recent success to disqualify him from being commander-in-chief. Wehner says the op-ed is the work of an “arrogant and intellectually rigid man”. Wehner’s colleague Max Boot weighs in as well, challenging Obama’s conclusions section-by-section.

John Hinderaker calls Obama’s op-ed “breathtakingly dishonest” in its attempt to vindicate his wrong decision about the surge, also criticizing Obama’s treatment of political progress in Iraq, and with regard to al-Qaeda and Afghanistan. According to Hinderaker, this could be the most dishonest thing produced by any “miscreant” in the history of American politics.

Posted in Election 08, Iraq, US foreign policy, US politics |