Obama Confronts Reporter Over "Surge" Question (VIDEO)

At the Unity Conference in Chicago this morning, Barack Obama, for the 365,292nd time, was asked if he felt he needed to admit that the "Surge" worked, and by extension, that McCain is awesome and the Bush administration brilliant. Because the "Surge," a thin sliver of military tactic that lasted a few months and is now over, is the ONE THING about the ENTIRE IRAQ WAR that the press is trying to get their head around. (Exhibit A: Katie Couric)

Here's the question, as asked by Time magazine's Romesh Ratnesar:

RATNESAR: Senator, I want to ask you about a subject you've had to address repeatedly on this trip, which is the situation in Iraq and the question whether the surge has helped improve conditions there. During the primaries, you criticized Senator Clinton for failing to say that her vote authorizing the war was a mistake. Now we have commanders on the ground pretty much saying that the surge succeeded, and yet you've said that if you had to do it all over again, you still would have voted against the surge. We're not going to ask you to change your position here.

OBAMA: You're not going to ask me, but go ahead.

RATNESAR: I would like to know whether you feel that after the last five years, haven't we learned that a commander in chief needs to be willing to acknowledge mistakes or errors in judgment when circumstances change?

So Obama should admit the "surge" has worked because the commanders on the ground say so? The funny thing about those commanders on the ground -- the Bush administration sure had to fire or otherwise hound out of their jobs a WHOLE LOT OF COMMANDERS before we were left with the ones who deploy nothing more than SURGE LOGIC (TM) and knee-jerk reactions whenever they are asked to summarize the strategic situation in Iraq.

And that's the irony of SURGE LOGIC - it actually thrives so long as the conditions include the commander-in-chief never being willing to acknowledge mistakes when circumstances change.

Anyway, Obama's response was this:

You know, I have to say, it is fascinating to me the to hear you guys reemphasize this over and over again. I have not heard yet somebody ask John McCain whether his vote to go into Iraq was a mistake. i haven't, during the entire week that we were having this conversation. And so the question is, what are the strategic judgments that have to be made in order to make America safe? I strongly believe that going into Iraq was a disaster, strategically. It distracted us from finishing the job in Afghanistan. I have acknowledged, repeatedly, in every one of these interviews that the fact that we put more troops in there helped to quell the violence. i've been saying that all week. The question is whether or not my position in suggesting that we need to begin a phased withdrawal, we should have begun it earlier, whether that position that I took was a mistake, and I do not believe it was, because I continue to believe that the only way for us to stabilize the situation in Iraq -- I believed it then, and I believe it now -- is for the parties to arrive at a set of political accommodations.

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