GOP presidential candidate John McCain mocked Democrat Barack Obama today for saying he’d take action as president “if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq.”
McCain told a crowd in Tyler, Texas “I have some news. Al-Qaida is in Iraq. It’s called ‘al-Qaida in Iraq.'”
In Obama’s defense, he probably reads the New York Times, which always calls it “Al Qaida in Mesopotamia.” That may have confused him. Anyway, to Hillary’s undoubted dismay it seems to be turning into a McCain vs. Obama election already.
UPDATE: Reader David Cavalier emails:
There’s an old adage that generals are always fighting the last war. So it is with the latest exchange between Obama and McCain
If you stop and consider it, Obama’s answer is not really an answer. We are not fighting over whether to invade Iraq. We are there. It is happening. That decision was made years ago. He is fighting a battle that was lost in 2003.
The question is what is the next President going to do with the current strategic situation. McCain rightly called him out for implying that there was no al-Qaida presence in Iraq and Obama responded with an irrelevant comment about the past and then some silly boilerplate about being the party of the future. Ironically, it sounds like Obama who is the party of the past.
This has been a rhetorical trick that Obama has used a lot when he gets hit for saying something stupid. He never admits being caught and he changes the subject to a different talking point as fast as he can, claiming that he wants to be about the “future.” Given his tendency to make bizarre and naive statements about foreign policy, I have to wonder how long he can get away with it.
I don’t believe the “flypaper” thesis about Iraq (that the invasion was planned as a trap to lure al-Qaida into a fight on foreign soil), it sounds too much like ex post facto rationalization. That being said, it cannot be denied that al-Qaida, in what was a major tactical blunder, decided to make Iraq the centerpiece of their strategy against the U.S. And they have been suffering some pretty severe setbacks. So it is certainly reasonable to wonder what Obama is thinking when he says we need to pull out of Iraq to fight al-Qaida. They made the decision to have the battle there. He should know that by now.
Indeed he should.
UPDATE: Reader Charles Wilson notes that the “flypaper” theory goes back quite a ways. And, of course, there’s this post.