Blogs For Victory

From The Hill:

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain on Sunday asserted that his Democratic rival’s positions on Iraq were politically motivated.

“Sen. Obama doesn’t understand,” the Arizona senator said regarding Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) opposition to the troop surge. “He doesn’t understand what’s at stake here, and he chose to take a political path that would have helped him get the nomination of his party.”

McCain added that, if the path that the Illinois senator advocated had been pursued, there “would have been chaos, genocide, increased Iranian influence, perhaps al Qaeda establishing a base again” in Iraq.

The GOP standard-bearer hopes that his foreign policy and military experience and support for the surge will help convince voters in November that he is the right choice to lead the country.

McCain, in an interview with ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” consistently hammered Obama on security-related issues and defended a remark he made earlier in which he said that the Democrat is willing to lose a war to win a political campaign.

The Arizona senator argued that, while he broke with President Bush and his party to demand that more troops should be sent to Iraq, Obama “made the decision [to oppose the surge], which was political, in order to help him get the nomination of his party.”

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who went on the trip to the Middle East with Obama, criticized the attacks on the Democrat and said McCain is “treading on some very thin ground here when he impugns motives and when we start to get into, ‘You’re less patriotic than me. I’m more patriotic’.”

Hagel, true to form for the anti-war people, is trying to say that any criticism of war criticism is an accusation of being unpatriotic, and thus beyond the pale. This bit of nonsense, I think, will not fly anymore – its clear that McCain does not impugn Obama’s patriotism – just his motivation and his judgement, both of which are highly questionable. For all we know Obama is deep down inside the most Yankee Doodle of all Dandies – what is at issue here is his manifestly wrong position on the troop surge and how that relates to his prospective ability to be President of the United States of America.

The anti-war point of view has been proven wrong from start to finish – it is wrong because it believes that war is just a misunderstanding which can be resolved by patient diplomacy. War, though, is usually the result of a very good understanding – especially on the part of the aggressor, who is usually convinced that his more aggressive nature is the result of inherent superiority. The so-called “peace movement” nearly added another charnel house to its record (for a more complete list of the peace movement’s victims, see my “20th Century Victims of Peace“) – but at the urging of Senator McCain, the calls for surrender by Obama and his Democrats were ignored, and victory has now been secured. And now it is Senator Obama who is seeking maximum personal advantage out of this.

First he used Iraq to wow the left, now he’s trying to use the victory in Iraq as a support for his withdrawal plan (updated, again and again as Obama needs to shift here and there on the political landscape) – he’s trying to have it both ways. Obama wants lefty support due to his anti-war rhetoric, and he wants center support for his call to move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan…he’s a peaceful warmonger, I guess.

We can’t afford four years of a President who adjusts his views to his personal, political needs – we need a President who will take an action even when assured it will be unpopular and may, indeed, cost him the White House. Senator McCain is that man; lets keep Obama in the Senate where for the next four to eight years (or ten, if you ask Obama) he can learn from President McCain what it takes to hold the most powerful office in the world.