Obama and Iraq

Leave it to Michael Gerson to make me write a second pro-Obama post in one day.  But first, a digression.  Gerson writes:

John McCain’s nomination was assured by the success of the surge he had consistently advocated, against intense opposition.

This is ludicrous.  McCain was the frontrunner in the spring of 2007, long before anyone could have reasonably claimed that the “surge” had done anything (not that many pundits didn’t make outlandish claims), and there was in any case never any doubt in the Republican rank-and-file that the “surge” was the right thing to do.  On the contrary, if McCain’s nomination was ever assured it was assured by the collapse of his only real national rival, Mitt Romney, under the waves of the Huckaboom, whose beginning had literally nothing to do with the war in Iraq. 

Gerson points to Obama’s hedging on the war prior to his election to the Senate, which is accurate enough (part of the “fairy tale” Bill Clinton decried, for which he was widely denounced), and his rather un-heroic opposition once in the Senate.  This is unfortunately the truth of Obama’s rather timid, not audacious, Senate career.  Had Russ Feingold run for President, as he had once contemplated before ruling out a campaign, he would have gone nowhere, as we all know, despite his far more consistent and principled antiwar and civil libertarian stand against both Iraq and the PATRIOT Act.  But all of this does not vindicate the profound cynicism of Wehner and Gerson.  McCain showed no political courage in supporting the “surge.”  As a matter of GOP primary politics, anyone who showed the least bit of doubt about the efficacy of escalation failed utterly, and McCain has never been one, contrary to the legend, to let scruples get in the way of ambition.  Despite his lackluster efforts in the Senate, his lack of leadership on the war once in office and his virtually indistinguishable position from that of Hillary Clinton on withdrawal, there has always been more risk involved in opposing an ongoing war–no matter how meekly–than in endorsing the status quo.