Obama's New Iraq War Offensive

[illinoisprogressive]

Sept. 12, 2007 - As Washington digests the two-day testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, and President Bush readies his next address on the war, the leading Democratic presidential candidates are returning to the campaign trail—testing out their Iraq War applause lines in the new postreport climate. Barack Obama scored this summer by reminding his cheering crowds of his early and enduring opposition to the war—a conflict that, in his words, “should never have been authorized and never have been waged.” Hillary Clinton’s supporters love her promise that if President Bush won’t end the war, “I will.”
Taking to the trail after the Petraeus testimony, Obama seized the opportunity to turn up the heat on the Democratic front runner. “Conventional thinking in Washington lined up for war,” he told supporters in Iowa. “The pundits judged the political winds to be blowing in the direction of the president. Despite—or perhaps because of—how much experience they had in Washington, too many politicians feared looking weak and failed to ask hard questions. Too many took the president at his word instead of reading the intelligence for themselves. Congress gave the president the authority to go to war. Our only opportunity to stop the war was lost.”

It was not lost on Obama’s audience at Ashford University—in the town of Clinton, of all places—whom he meant to single out as a politician who failed to read the Iraq intelligence for herself: Hillary Clinton.

Obama’s aides believe her vote for the war offers a possible chink in the formidable Clinton armor. They eagerly point out that she failed to read the full and classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Unlike the public version of that report, the full NIE included multiple caveats and disclaimers that cast doubt on key assertions by the White House.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20746894/site/newsweek/