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Watch: New McCain Ad Blasts Obama Over Foreign Policy

Obama Slams Fox News - Uninformed About Troops

Barack Obama sassed Major Garrett of Fox News and suggested that President Bush made the troops watch Fox News. Garrett then points out that the troops watch what they want, and perhaps Obama doesn't know because he scarcely visits them.

The Iraq We'd Have If Obama Had His Way

Source: NY POST

Barack Obama is enjoying a popular jaunt through the Middle East, but if America had heeded his judgment over the last five years, the fawning stories that have followed him this trip might be quite different.

Imagine:

  Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama overflew the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Najaf Monday, where the mass graves for an estimated 240,000 victims of sectarian violence killed since 2007 were visible even from an altitude.

  Sen. Obama was on his way to meet with American soldiers completing the US withdrawal from Iraq in Kuwaiti ports. Miles away, Iranian and Saudi delegations were meeting in an emergency summit in Kuwait City in an effort to keep the Iraqi civil war from boiling over into open regional conflict. Both sides have accused the other of providing advanced weaponry and training, while faulting American leaders for the bloody collapse of the Iraqi state.

Fortunately, of course, none of that happened.

Obama was in Baghdad on Monday for one reason and one reason only: President Bush wisely ignored the senator's repeated calls to abandon the Iraqi people and instead listened to advice to change commanders, strategy and tactics in Iraq. The resulting counterinsur- gency doctrine and a surge of American forces into Iraq coincided with a popular Sunni revolt against the al Qaeda-led insurgency known as the Awakening movement, which was followed by the fracturing of the Shiite Mahdi Army and other militant groups.

If we'd listened to Obama in 2002, Saddam Hussein (or his murderous son Qusay) would still be brutally repressing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds - and some of the world's most accomplished terrorists (such as Abu Abbas, 1993 WTC bomber Abdul Rahman Yasin and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) would still call Iraq home. I doubt Obama would be flying to Baghdad.

If we'd listened to him in 2005-2006, when things were at their worst, then the nightmare scenario might well be playing out: an open Iraqi civil war, verging on a wider regional war, with Saudi Arabia and Iran backing different sides in Iraq. I doubt Obama would be flying to Baghdad.

So, by all means let the journalists of The New York Times paint his visit as an accomplishment of some sort.

Just keep in mind that if we'd followed the novice senator's judgment at any point during his career, Iraq could've been too dangerous a place for his flight to even consider touching down.

Obama Concedes Surge Didn't Go As He Expected

*SHOCKER - Obama says it was ethnic cleansing in Baghdad that actually took the violence level down*

Source: MARC AMBINDER

Sen. Barack Obama said it was "fair" to notice that he did not anticipate that the surge of U.S. troops into Iraq would be coincident with the so-called Sunni Awakening and the decisions of Shia militias to reduce their footprints, the combination of which led to measurable declines in violence.

In an interview with ABC's Terry Moran, Obama said that he "did not anticipate, and I think that this is a fair characterization, the convergence of not only the surge but the Sunni awakening in which a whole host of Sunni tribal leaders decided that they had had enough with Al Qaeda, in the Shii’a community the militias standing down to some degrees. So what you had is a combination of political factors inside of Iraq that then came right at the same time as terrific work by our troops. Had those political factors not occurred, I think that my assessment would have been correct."

Moran noted that Obama had claimed that the surge  "would not make a significant dent in the violence."

Responded Obama: "In the violence in Iraq overall, right. So the point that I was making at the time was that the political dynamic was the driving force between that sectarian violence. And we could try to keep a lid on it, but if these underlining dynamic continued to bubble up and explode the way they were, then we would be in a difficult situation. I am glad that in fact those political dynamic shifted at the same time that our troops did outstanding work."

"But," asked Moran,"if the country had pursued your policy of withdrawing in the face of this horrific violence, what do you think Iraq would look like now?"

Obama said it would be hard to speculate. "The Sunnis might have made the same decisions at that time. The Shii’as might have made some similar decisions based on political calculation. There was ethnic cleansing in Baghdad that actually took the violence level down," he said.

Obama also told Moran that there were circumstances under which he could revise his instruction to U.S. generals to begin withdrawing combat brigades at the pace of one-to-two per month.

"I've always reserved the right, uh, to say---let's say that ethnic, uh, ethnic fighting broke out once again---I've reserved the right to say---I don't--I'm not going to stand idly by if genocide is occurring. I'm not going to stand idly by if vital United States interests are at stake. Um, so in that sense yes, I retain the flexibility anyone who in the job of commander in chief is constantly reassessing facts, risks, and so forth."

Read the full interview, and watch video here.

Obama asked if he would still not support the surge, knowing what he knows now: