Do Visits to Iraq Equal Perspective? Obama Says "No"

July 13, 2008 7:06 PM

ABC News' Sunlen Miller reports: Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., argued in San Diego today that just because Sen. John McCain has made multiple visits to Iraq, that does not mean that he has the correct perspective on the region.

"John McCain has been in Congress 25 years, no doubt about that. If this is a longevity measure, then John McCain wins," Obama said to reporters. "I'll recall the visit he made last year in which he was surrounded by helicopters and SWAT teams and came back and reported how safe everything was in Baghdad. You know, I don't think that that was indicative of what was actually happening on the ground at that time."

[...]

"Before we went into Iraq, I knew the difference between Shia and Sunni. Before we went into Iraq, I said that this is going to be an extraordinarily costly endeavor," Obama said. "Before we went into Iraq, I said that we would be bogged down, that it would cost us billions of dollars and thousands of lives and that it would fan anti-American sentiment and that it would distract us from the war against Afghanistan."

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So, to Obama's way of thinking, nothing has to be actually experienced to be understood. Everything is subjective. Especially war.

Good to know where audacious Obama stands on receiving and processing reality-based information. Nowhere to be found. Obama relies, obviously, on the talking points he receives every twenty minutes from organizations such as MoveOn, that's where Obama's expertise about war is learned.

Because John McCain has actually fought in a war, because John McCain has been a prisoner of war subjected to torture, because John McCain has visited Iraq (and the Middle East) at least eight times since the war began, has discussed plans and policy face-to-face with the military commanders and the boots on the ground; Obama (who has been to Iraq (and the Middle East) but once in the past) clings hopelessly to the illogical and irrational notion that he knows better than John McCain when it comes to war and its prosecution.

It is to laugh. Place the "King of the Naive" crown on Obama's head. This idiotic bit of unreason has garnered him a side order of fool's laurels to rest upon, too.