OBAMA THE WEASEL
On Iraq, Antiwar Candidate Delivers More Carnage
NEW YORK-Obama won the Democratic nomination and the presidency by speaking out against the Iraq War. Now that he's packing for Washington, however, the old Chicago lawyer is using Harvard Law weasel words to make sure the war goes on for years.
Germans are organized. The French are snotty. Americans have a national character trait, too: inattention. It's now obvious that Obama exploited our hard-wired inability to read between the lines to lay the groundwork for what many of his supporters will soon view as a terrible betrayal.
Right there, in a July 14th op/ed, is Obama's triumph of plausible deniability: "The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep," he wrote in The New York Times. "Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president."
Seems clear. End means end. Finito. No more. But there's an interesting phrase in Obama's promises to pull out, repeated throughout the campaign": "combat troops." "We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated," he wrote in his op/ed. "We can safely redeploy our combat brigades."
"It's time to www.uexpress.com/tedrall/end this war," Obama concluded. Ending the war would mean following the political cartoonist Matt Bors' prescription: The troops would go to the airport. They would board planes. They would fly away.