WON’T BACK DOWN: Taheri responds to Obama.

Obama also told NBC: “The foreign minister agreed that the next administration should not be bound by an agreement that’s currently made, but I think the only way to assure that is to make sure that there is strong bipartisan support, that Congress is involved, that the American people know the outlines of this agreement.

“And my concern is that if the Bush administration negotiates, as it currently has, and given that we’re entering into the heat of political season, that we’re probably better off not trying to complete a hard-and-fast agreement before the next administration takes office, but I think obviously these conversations have to continue.

“As I said, my No. 1 priority is making sure that we don’ t have a situation in which US troops on the ground are somehow vulnerable to, are made more vulnerable, because there is a lack of a clear mandate.”

This confirms precisely what I suggested in my article: Obama preferred to have no agreement on US troop withdrawals until a new administration took office in Washington.

Obama has changed position on another key issue. In the NBC report, he pretends that US troops in Iraq do not have a “clear mandate.” Now, however, he admits that there is a clear mandate from the UN Security Council and that he’d have no objection to extending it pending a bilateral Iraq-US agreement. . . .

Contrary to what Obama and his campaign have said, Iraqi officials insist that at no point in his talks in Washington and Baghdad did Obama make a distinction between SOFA and SFA when he advised them to wait for the next American administration.

The real news I see in the Obama statement is that there may be an encouraging evolution in his position on Iraq: The “rebuttal” shows that the senator no longer shares his party leadership’s belief that the United States has lost the war in Iraq.

Well, that’s good, right?

Earlier posts on this subject here and here. Plus, here’s a piece by Bob Owens. “If this charge is false, the Obama campaign must push forcefully for and get a substantial correction, if not a full retraction of the Taheri article. If they don’t, then longtime accusations of Obama’s naked self-interest may doom an already flailing campaign.” I don’t think the Obama Campaign’s response comes anywhere close to that. In fact, it seems more to confirm Taheri’s account.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire has much more on this, including Obama’s “baffling ‘denial’ which some keen observers noted did not seem to deny much.” Plus this: “I think Obama has been caught reading his campaign literature to foreign negotiators.”