McCain Asks Obama To Visit Iraq With Him – Update: Obama Turns Down Trip

Good for McCain:

Republican John McCain on Monday sharply criticized Democratic rival Barack Obama for not having been to Iraq since 2006, and said they should visit the war zone together.

“Look at what happened in the last two years since Senator Obama visited and declared the war lost,” the GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting told The Associated Press in an interview, noting that the Illinois senator’s last trip to Iraq came before the military buildup that is credited with curbing violence.

“He really has no experience or knowledge or judgment about the issue of Iraq and he has wanted to surrender for a long time,” the Arizona senator added. “If there was any other issue before the American people, and you hadn’t had anything to do with it in a couple of years, I think the American people would judge that very harshly.”

I really don’t see how Obama is going to get out of this one. If he goes to Iraq there is no way he can ignore the progress that has been made since the last time he was there. Every politician of every stripe has admitted it once they put boots on the ground. If he tries to only focus on some of the bad inside Iraq without admitting all the progress he will look foolish.

If he doesn’t go then he looks like the naive inexperienced politician we’ve all said he was. He wants to go talk to Iran, Venezuela, and every other tyrant across the globe but he won’t go see the progress in Iraq himself?

Plus, McCain, who has shown his willingness to be bipartisan and walk across the aisle (much to my chagrin in a lot of ways) is doing it again. He wants to make it a bipartisan road trip. If Obama doesn’t go then his talk about being the one who can unite both parties looks exactly like we’ve been saying it was. Bulls&*t.

UPDATE

Shocker:

John McCain’s proposal is nothing more than a political stunt, and we don’t need any more ‘Mission Accomplished’ banners or walks through Baghdad markets to know that Iraq’s leaders have not made the political progress that was the stated purpose of the surge. The American people don’t want any more false promises of progress, they deserve a real debate about a war that has overstretched our military, and cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars without making us safer.

They need a debate with people who go see the damn place for themselves instead of listening to the squeals and cries from the MSM.

Allah with a good take on the spin from Obama:

If they’re worried about the military giving them a dog-and-pony show, the answer isn’t to decline the trip but to counterpropose a more comprehensive trip than even McCain’s suggesting and turn it into a real fact-finding mission. Don’t spend two hours looking at charts with Petraeus. Take four or five days; go to Basra and Mosul. If they simply can’t suspend campaigning for that long, send a joint team of advisors from both sides. He won’t do it because he’s afraid of what he might hear, which goes back to a point I’ve been making ever since the Jamil Hussein saga: The left would have you believe Iraq hawks can’t admit that any aspect of the war might be going badly, but the opposite has always been more nearly true.

The left will not, cannot, and refuse to EVER acknowledge anything good coming out of Iraq. While milbloggers such as Michael Yon have come out and pointed out the bad, the left seems incapable of doing the same when the news is good. Of course that would mean giving compliments to Bushitler and that is against their religion.

Stop the ACLU puts it bluntly:

No doubt the Maverick painted Obama into a corner on this one, and Obama decided the least damage would be done by appeasing to his anti-war base and remaining in his ignorant bliss of surrender. The left are trying to spin it as some kind of genius move, but its a predictable, typically pathetic weasel move we have come to expect from the coward.

Curt

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