I have seen fuck all about this from the MSM so far. It could end up not being nearly as big a deal as it should be, like almost everything else that goes wrong for McCain. It'll be up to Obama to start hitting him early and hard on this.

"And we really wouldn't be in a position to discuss withdrawal today if Senator Obama's original views had prevailed and we hadn't invaded Iraq."

Well we don´t know in what position we would find ourselves and what we would be discussing had we not invaded Iraq.
And of course we would not have been in a position to invade Iraq if we had overthrown that regime in 1991.

The fact remains: Obama was wrong on the surge. Who was wrong at first place is a different kind of question because than you can go more and more back in history.

McCain is going to have trouble worming away from his earlier statement? Really? Have his friends in the media ever given him trouble for any of his numerous previous flip-flops? What makes you think they'll start now?

The fact remains: Obama was wrong on the surge. Who was wrong at first place is a different kind of question because than you can go more and more back in history.

How is it a different kind of question? If you're going to argue that we don't know what would have happened if we hadn't invaded Iraq in the first place, it seems silly to claim that we can be any more certain about what would have happened if Obama's views had prevailed in 2006. Neither happened. The fact that the surge, and more importantly the new tactics that were implemented with it, have been successful says nothing about the consequences of withdrawing when Obama wanted to withdraw. It's pure speculation.

If one doctor wants to treat cancer with chemotherapy and the other wants to use radiation, and chemo works, it doesn't mean the guy who wanted to use radiation was wrong.

Alan, let's not forget the game being played with the name "the surge":

The pretended meaning is, The US increased troop strength in Iraq for a period of time beginning in 2007. The actual meaning is, the US increased troop strength WHILE ramping up a program to pay off Sunni resistance leaders WHILE Iraq’s warring ethno-religious factions finished completely remaking Iraq’s demographic patterns, owing to tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of exiled and internally displaced, WHILE the US turned the capital into a warren of barricades. The net result of all those changes has been a less obtrusively violent Iraq for the time being, and the whole arrangement is "The Surge" in practice, but the cheerleaders talk as if it was all due to The Surge in pretense. Meanwhile Iraq’s "calm" would count as calamity almost anywhere on earth but Darfur or Zimbabwe.

The fact that the surge, and more importantly the new tactics that were implemented with it, have been successful

It sounds to me like you all are underestimating the political strength of "the surge worked, and Obama was wrong on the surge."

I'm not saying it's over, and I'm not saying its good policy, but it's a pretty good political sell.

Everything BushCo does is politically motivated. So I speculate that they decided "50, 100 years in Iraq" was a political loser, and are now seeking to neutralize Obama's advantage here. So, that seems to imply that they like the domestic policy terrain better. That would scare me if I were a Republican.

"What fact? Successful at what? The surge has been *proclaimed* successful by our corporate media elites, but without demanding any actual successes before declaring successfulness."

Successful at decreasing the level of violence in Iraq, which has indisputably gone down. You can argue about whether it's just a temporary fix, or how much of the decrease in violence is due to various other factors, or what the original rationale was, but at the end of the day, a decrease in violence has to be considered a good thing, and there has undeniably been progress on that count. It's not just "corporate media elites" who regard decreased violence as a sign of at least some success.

The fact is that the Surge failed at what it was intended to do: to create the necessary breathing room for political reconciliation to occur.

The fact that it has had positive effects doesn't obviate the fact that it's a complete fucking failure at what it was intended to do, or that the leader of the country (not to mention the vast majority of the citizens of the country) keep saying, "Thank you, now leave."

As for the "victory and honor" comment, I HOPE Obama isn't as worried about "victory and honor" as McCain claims to be, since no matter what we do in Iraq, I don't think we'll be able to leave and legitimately declare "victory" anytime soon. Also, I don't think we'll ever be able to consider our little Iraqi adventure "honorable." There's been so much mismanagement, impunity, and general disdain for the Iraqi people that the only option for an honorable action would be to get our troops and more notably, our mercenaries, out and stop insulting Iraqis with our occupation.
I suppose that leaving with "honor" would involve providing security while we're going, rather than picking up and leaving a complete mess instead of a moderate mess, but I still don't think that "honor" is an appropriate word for the situation.

I have to stress this again, just because I'm in disbelief. The fact that anyone would suggest that we should be able to declare victory before leaving Iraq is ludicrous. I think that at this point, it's about time to accept that it hasn't quite gone well on the whole, and it would be better to leave in a reasonable amount of time rather than to deceive ourselves into thinking that "victory" is at hand if we just wait another year.

Wait...this sounds familiar...I feel like I've heard this before, 40 years ago. Oh well, just deja vu I guess.