Obamessiah: "Get Out, Get Out! No, Wait, Now Stay There..."

Well, this is interesting:

While campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion."

If this is true, this is going to be a serious blow to the Obamessiah's credibility on the war.  He's been chanting about the war being lost and/or pulling the troops out for years, and if he has now been caught delaying that withdrawal for purely political reasons...well, let's just say it's a McCain campaign commercial waiting to happen. 

Some other bits of potentially explosive analysis in there:

Obama has made many contradictory statements with regard to Iraq. His latest position is that US combat troops should be out by 2010. Yet his effort to delay an agreement would make that withdrawal deadline impossible to meet.

Supposing he wins, Obama's administration wouldn't be fully operational before February - and naming a new ambassador to Baghdad and forming a new negotiation team might take longer still.

By then, Iraq will be in the throes of its own campaign season. Judging by the past two elections, forming a new coalition government may then take three months. So the Iraqi negotiating team might not be in place until next June.

Then, judging by how long the current talks have taken, restarting the process from scratch would leave the two sides needing at least six months to come up with a draft accord. That puts us at May 2010 for when the draft might be submitted to the Iraqi parliament - which might well need another six months to pass it into law.

Thus, the 2010 deadline fixed by Obama is a meaningless concept, thrown in as a sop to his anti-war base.

Eh, it might tick them off, but I think they'd support him no matter what he does.  They certainly won't jump ship to McCain.  The only negative he'd face from that crowd would be that their contributions would dry up, but he won't need them if he's already in office.  Still, it's an interesting suggestion.  Here's something else that's worth considering, since it's from the Iraqi perspective:

Iraqi leaders are divided over the US election. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (whose party is a member of the Socialist International) sees Obama as "a man of the Left" - who, once elected, might change his opposition to Iraq's liberation. Indeed, say Talabani's advisers, a President Obama might be tempted to appropriate the victory that America has already won in Iraq by claiming that his intervention transformed failure into success.

Maliki's advisers have persuaded him that Obama will win - but the prime minister worries about the senator's "political debt to the anti-war lobby" - which is determined to transform Iraq into a disaster to prove that toppling Saddam Hussein was "the biggest strategic blunder in US history."

Obama has given Iraqis the impression that he doesn't want Iraq to appear anything like a success, let alone a victory, for America. The reason? He fears that the perception of US victory there might revive the Bush Doctrine of "pre-emptive" war - that is, removing a threat before it strikes at America.

Despite some usual equivocations on the subject, Obama rejects pre-emption as a legitimate form of self -defense. To be credible, his foreign-policy philosophy requires Iraq to be seen as a failure, a disaster, a quagmire, a pig with lipstick or any of the other apocalyptic adjectives used by the American defeat industry in the past five years.

Yet Iraq is doing much better than its friends hoped and its enemies feared.

Isn't it amazing that even people across the globe -- and from a fundamentally different culture -- understand the Obamessiah's steadfast refusal and ideological line in the sand that the Iraq war must be a defeat for America?  Even they know that he cannot allow it to be anything else.

So, why is this a necessity for Obama?  With him, America is always to blame, America is always at fault, and America is always broken.  He's made this the central theme to his campaign.  To allow an American victory (without his intervention) would be to rip a huge hole in his tapestry that America is the problem that he is here to fix.  To admit this would not only require humility (which he doesn't have), but the admission that he's been wrong throughout his entire campaign, which he cannot afford politically.  His message is that America sucks, and that he's the only one who can restore it.  To admit otherwise would be to admit he's not quite the savior he claims to be.

I ask you: is this the kind of man who should be leading our country?  A man who puts himself ahead of his country, especially at the expense of that country?

There's my two cents.