posted September 15, 2008 09:08 AM            

Bush has said...and said repeatedly that US military forces would stand down when Iraqi military forces were able to stand up.

Not only has O'Bomber lied about Bush adopting his troops withdrawal plan...a colossal lie but now, it comes out he lobbied the Iraqi government to stall the negotiations with the Bush administration.

What O'Bomber and the rest of the brain dead demoscat Congress doesn't get is that Bush is Commander in Chief of US military forces AND that it's Bush who is in charge of US foreign policy and not the brain dead demoscat morons in the Congress.

So while O'Bomber is lying through his teeth to the Kool-Aid drinking suckers who support him, saying he was for an immediate withdrawal and then later that he would remove all US forces within 16 months, he's privately attempting to twist the arm of the Iraqi government in a scheme whereby he would get credit for the negotiated withdrawal of US forces.

There's nothing whatsoever this lying dunce, THE ONE, THE MESSIAH O'Bomber says that can be taken as anything approaching the truth.

Everyone should thank their lucky stars this lying dunce and creation of the media will never be President.

Hell, even the Iraqis have O'Bomber all figured out so...why is it that the Kool-Aid drinking supporters of O'Bomber are too mentally challenged to do so?

OBAMA TRIED TO STALL GIS' IRAQ WITHDRAWAL
LONG VIEW: Barack Obama tours Iraq with Gen. David Petraeus in July, when he sought to stall any agreement for US troop withdrawal until President Bush left office.
September 15, 2008

WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion."

"However, as an Iraqi, I prefer to have a security agreement that regulates the activities of foreign troops, rather than keeping the matter open." Zebari says.

Though Obama claims the US presence is "illegal," he suddenly remembered that Americans troops were in Iraq within the legal framework of a UN mandate. His advice was that, rather than reach an accord with the "weakened Bush administration," Iraq should seek an extension of the UN mandate.

While in Iraq, Obama also tried to persuade the US commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, to suggest a "realistic withdrawal date." They declined.

Obama has made many contradictory statements with regard to Iraq. His latest position is that US combat troops should be out by 2010. Yet his effort to delay an agreement would make that withdrawal deadline impossible to meet.

Supposing he wins, Obama's administration wouldn't be fully operational before February - and naming a new ambassador to Baghdad and forming a new negotiation team might take longer still.

By then, Iraq will be in the throes of its own campaign season. Judging by the past two elections, forming a new coalition government may then take three months. So the Iraqi negotiating team might not be in place until next June.

Then, judging by how long the current talks have taken, restarting the process from scratch would leave the two sides needing at least six months to come up with a draft accord. That puts us at May 2010 for when the draft might be submitted to the Iraqi parliament - which might well need another six months to pass it into law.

Thus, the 2010 deadline fixed by Obama is a meaningless concept, thrown in as a sop to his anti-war base.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Bush administration have a more flexible timetable in mind.

According to Zebari, the envisaged time span is two or three years - departure in 2011 or 2012. That would let Iraq hold its next general election, the third since liberation, and resolve a number of domestic political issues.

Even then, the dates mentioned are only "notional," making the timing and the cadence of withdrawal conditional on realities on the ground as appreciated by both sides.

Iraqi leaders are divided over the US election. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (whose party is a member of the Socialist International) sees Obama as "a man of the Left" - who, once elected, might change his opposition to Iraq's liberation. Indeed, say Talabani's advisers, a President Obama might be tempted to appropriate the victory that America has already won in Iraq by claiming that his intervention transformed failure into success.

Maliki's advisers have persuaded him that Obama will win - but the prime minister worries about the senator's "political debt to the anti-war lobby" - which is determined to transform Iraq into a disaster to prove that toppling Saddam Hussein was "the biggest strategic blunder in US history."

Other prominent Iraqi leaders, such as Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Kurdish regional President Massoud Barzani, believe that Sen. John McCain would show "a more realistic approach to Iraqi issues."

Obama has given Iraqis the impression that he doesn't want Iraq to appear anything like a success, let alone a victory, for America. The reason? He fears that the perception of US victory there might revive the Bush Doctrine of "pre-emptive" war - that is, removing a threat before it strikes at America.

Despite some usual equivocations on the subject, Obama rejects pre-emption as a legitimate form of self -defense. To be credible, his foreign-policy philosophy requires Iraq to be seen as a failure, a disaster, a quagmire, a pig with lipstick or any of the other apocalyptic adjectives used by the American defeat industry in the past five years.

posted September 17, 2008 04:33 PM            

ELECTION 2008
Obama camp confirms troop pullout delay plan
Spokeswoman denies report; ends up affirming main claim
Posted: September 16, 2008
12:45 pm Eastern

The Obama campaign issued an angry denial to a report yesterday that the Democratic presidential candidate privately urged Iraqi leaders to delay U.S. troop withdrawals, but the statement essentially confirmed the story.

Responding to a column by Iranian-born analyst Amir Taheri in the New York Post, Obama spokeswoman Wendy Morigi insisted Obama "has never urged a delay in negotiations, nor has he urged a delay in immediately beginning a responsible drawdown of our combat brigades."

But in the same statement, Morigi said Obama had told the Iraqis they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of U.S. troops until after President Bush leaves office, the Associated Press reported.

Further, according to the New York Times in a report on June 16, Obama himself has confirmed his actions.

Recalling his meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama said in the Times report, "My concern is that the Bush administration, in a weakened state politically, ends up trying to rush an agreement that in some ways might be binding to the next adminsitration, whether it's my administration or Senator McCain's administration. The foreign minister agreed that the next administration should not be bound by an agreement that's currently made."

Zebari had confirmed in the report that Obama "asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the U.S. elections and the formation of a new administration."

In his column, Taheri wrote about the meeting between Zebari and Obama, in which Obama urged a delay in the withdrawal of American forces.

Taheri states Obama insisted it was in Iraq's best interest to avoid an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion."

That private position would be a stark contrast to Obama's public record.

"The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq's leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops," Obama said last year at a university in Iowa. "Not in six months or one year – now."

In January of last year, Obama offered legislation on the floor of the Senate called the Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007, which called for troop withdrawals to begin in May 2007 and to conclude by March 2008.

And in his New York Times editorial released the same month the senator toured the Middle East, Obama wrote, "The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated."

Taheri reported that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's advisers wonder if Obama is privately working to delay troop withdrawal until after the election in order to claim credit – should Obama win the presidency – for ending the war.

"Indeed, say Talabani's advisers," reports Taheri, "a President Obama might be tempted to appropriate the victory that America has already won in Iraq by claiming that his intervention transformed failure into success."

posted September 17, 2008 11:43 PM            

The Obama campaign spent more than five hours on Monday attempting to figure out the best refutation of the explosive New York Post report that quoted Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari as saying that Barack Obama during his July visit to Baghdad demanded that Iraq not negotiate with the Bush Administration on the withdrawal of American troops. Instead, he asked that they delay such negotiations until after the presidential handover at the end of January.

The three problems, according to campaign sources: The report was true, there were at least three other people in the room with Obama and Zebari to confirm the conversation, and there was concern that there were enough aggressive reporters based in Baghdad with the sources to confirm the conversation that to deny the comments would create a bigger problem.

Instead, Obama's national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi told reporters that Obama told the Iraqis that they should not rush through what she termed a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of U.S. forces until after President Bush left office. In other words, the Iraqis should not negotiate an American troop withdrawal.

According to a Senate staffer working for Sen. Joseph Biden, Biden himself got involved in the shaping of the statement. "The whole reason he's on the ticket is the foreign policy insight," explained the staffer.