Insidious Real Goal of Reporting on Supposed Obama "Flip-Flop" on Iraq

All the chatter over the last 24 hours on cable news has been about Obama's supposed "flip-flopping" on the Iraq War.  Besides the fact that these "allegations" are utterly baseless, the right-wing-inspired blathering has distracted us from a very substantive discussion of policy which Obama offered in Fargo.

Another absurd tale from down in the rabbit hole. In the first court review of the Bush Administration's secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, it was revealed that the government claimed the accusations presented in its secret documents should be considered truth -- not because there were hard facts backing them up -- but because the accusations were repeated in multiple government documents.

Thankfully the federal appeals court has unanimously ruled that the claims supporting Huzaifa Parhat's six-year detention in Guantanamo were "bare and unverifiable." The absurdity of the Bush Administration's argument was not lost on the court. Reports the New York Times: "The court compared [the government's argument] to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem 'The Hunting of the Snark': 'I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.' 'This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,' said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit."

This is just another example of the Bush Administration tossing aside objective fact in order to create a world where they make their own rules; it's just another stop on our country's journey from Human Rights Watchdog to Human Rights Abuser. And it just goes to show how the mere existence of Guantanamo flies in the face of the Constitution. The Bush Administration has lost a string of Guantanamo Bay court decisions. But it's simply not enough to try to counteract these injustices as they happen; we need to start at the source. We need to close Guantanamo Bay Detention Center and do what we can to reverse this smear on the human rights history of the United States. You can start by signing Progressive Future's Close Guantanamo Petition and telling your friends.

Call it a qualified victory.

On July 1, the Pentagon agreed to investigate the showers built by KBR, a private military contractor in Iraq. More than a dozen U.S. soldiers have been fatally electrocuted by faulty wiring in the showers. There has been a lot of blogger commentary and reporting about the electrocution, including several items I wrote for Progressive Future.

And while I think we certainly helped push this issue into the mainstream, I'm pretty sure all the blogger activism in the world would not have made a bit of a difference without the efforts of Cheryl Harris.

Unbelievable. Yesterday on Hardball, Andrea Mitchell led with an oh so provocative tease: "Does Obama have an Iraq problem?" Now, in fairness, the question she posed was based on a piece in The New Yorker by George Packer entitled "Obama's Iraq Problem" which opens with the following paragraph:

In February, 2007, when Barack Obama declared that he was running for President, violence in Iraq had reached apocalyptic levels, and he based his candidacy, in part, on a bold promise to begin a rapid withdrawal of American forces upon taking office. At the time, this pledge represented conventional thinking among Democrats and was guaranteed to play well with primary voters. But in the year and a half since then two improbable, though not unforeseeable, events have occurred: Obama has won the Democratic nomination, and Iraq, despite myriad crises, has begun to stabilize. With the general election four months away, Obama's rhetoric on the topic now seems outdated and out of touch, and the nominee-apparent may have a political problem concerning the very issue that did so much to bring him this far.

Who's the outdated and out of touch one, Mr. Packer? The truth is what Rasmussen has found over and over again, that Americans are rejecting McCain's frame of the war and embracing Obama's, in red states and blue states alike.

The question Rasmussen asks: "When it comes to the situation in Iraq, which is the more important goal for the next president to accomplish during his first term...winning the war or getting the troops home?" As you can see, the only place "Winning the war" wins the argument or is even close is in the reddest of red states or McCain's home state.

So while Iraq may have dropped down the lists of voters' most pressing issues, judging by these results, if it were to rise again in people's minds, it may actually benefit Obama. But even if we accepted the CW that McCain benefits when the war is the top issue, Chris Cilizza breaks down the extent to which politically Obama so does not have an Iraq problem.

From yesterday's Hardball:

"This is essentially a win win for Obama. If the war continues to look like it is not moving toward a resolution, if things remain unsettled there, Obama can say "look, we need to move out, John McCain wants it to be more of the same. If it gets better, if violence continues to drop, if it looks like stability has arrived, then the war moves off the radar as an issue and Obama still wins."

This video does a good job of taking down Mitchell's and Packer's premise as well:

In January, 2006 outraged that her country was illegally imprisoning people at Guantanamo, Mahvish Rukhsana -- a journalist and recent law school graduate -- volunteered to translate for the prisoners and eventually began representing an Afghan detainee. She has since published the stories of the detainees she has met in the newly-released book, My Guantanamo Diary. For more information, please visit http://www.mahvishkhan.com.

The work that lawyers like Rukhsana have done to advocate on behalf of these detainees contributed to a recent Supreme Court ruling to grant habeas corpus to all Guantanamo prisoners. That is why I felt so privileged to be able to talk to her about the importance of upholding the Constitution and restoring our international reputation. My interview with Rukhsana was conducted just before the Supreme Court's landmark ruling, and has been edited down to narrative form. [cross-posted from www.progressivefuture.org]

Today in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, John McCain said that if he had it to do all over again, and even knowing then what we know now, that Iraq did not have any WMD, he would STILL have invaded Iraq.

This is an incredible statement, and demonstrates beyond dispute Wesley Clark's observation that McCain lacks the judgment to be President or Commander-In-Chief.  It is also, of course, a position which is strongly rejected by the majority of the American public, who correctly view the Iraqi invasion as a catastrophic mistake.

Barack Obama and every Democratic surrogate should be on the news 24/7, for the indefinite future, talking about McCain's position.

Here is part of the report of Brian Scheid of the Bucks County Courier Times (the full story is available at http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/113-07012008-1556942.html):

I think that these quiet murmurs about the possibility that Senator Obama may "flip" on Iraq are correct.

You guys are gonna go absolutely ballistic when that happens, so I want to share my thoughts on this one, because it won't mean what a lot of you will probably think it means.  I'm not saying you're children (far from it) but your passion will mean that you miss a very obvious signal, and you won't read the details of what's suggested.

And that's a terrible mistake...

According to the Politico's Jon Martin (quoting Bill Kristol and George Packer), the answer is...yes.

The next, and perhaps most significant, Obama move to the middle could be on the issue which initially sparked his campaign: Iraq.

Observers from the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol to George Packer, the New Yorker writer and author of "The Assassins Gate" can already see it coming:

Said Kristol yesterday on Fox News Sunday:

   The next big flip for Obama, and this will make Brit even more astonished, will be on Iraq. He's going to go to Iraq, meet with General Petraeus, decide the surge is working and walk back from his immediate unconditioned withdrawal.   And suddenly, it's going to be, "Well, we're going to be very careful, gradual." "Honorable withdrawal," Obama said the other day -- an honorable conclusion to the Iraq war.

And Packer in this week's New Yorker:

   Obama, whatever the idealistic yearnings of his admirers, has turned out to be a cold-eyed, shrewd politician. The same pragmatism that prompted him last month to forgo public financing of his campaign will surely lead him, if he becomes President, to recalibrate his stance on Iraq. He doubtless realizes that his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reënergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia's recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse. The question is whether Obama will publicly change course before November. So far, he has offered nothing more concrete than this: "We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in."

   Obama's advisers have been more forthcoming. Samantha Power, before she resigned from the campaign for making an indiscreet remark about Hillary Clinton, told the BBC, "He will, of course, not rely upon some plan that he's crafted as a Presidential candidate or a U.S. senator. He will rely upon a plan--an operational plan--that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground."