This Obama exchange in an interview with ABC’s Terry Moran is getting significant criticism today around the blogosphere:

Moran: If you had to do it over again, knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?
Obama: No. Because, keep in mind that —
Moran: You wouldn’t?
Obama: Keep in mind, these kind of hypotheticals are very difficult. You know hindsight is 20/20. But I think that what I am absolutely convinced of is at that time we had to change the political debate because the view of the Bush administration at that time was one I just disagreed with.

This comment from John Feehery in The Hill’s Pundits Blog:

For Obama to refuse to accept the fact that he was wrong on the surge, and then for him to proclaim that he knows more than the generals about this war, is stunning.

During the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson would micromanage the war from the White House, going so far as to pick out the targets for the Air Force.

Johnson’s micromanaging of the war in Vietnam led to our defeat.

Now Barack Obama, who has far less experience than Johnson, is promising the same kind of political strategy.

This from Betsy Newmark:

So Obama had to oppose the surge because he didn’t like the Bush administration. I suppose that, by broader issues, he means the fighting in Afghanistan. But how would it have improved Afghanistan if Iraq had descended even deeper into the bloody chaos that it was experiencing before the surge began? I know that no politician likes to admit that he made a mistake before, but it’s clear that Obama’s vaunted judgment was totally wrong about the surge and he won’t admit that because he’d have to admit that McCain was right and he was wrong on a national security issue that they both had to vote on.

He admits that it was a success, but he’d still oppose it. Does he just prefer failure?

Obama says he doesn’t want to answer hypotheticals. Well, isn’t the whole premise of his superior judgment to having opposed taking out Saddam Hussein really a hypothetical that presupposes that it would have been better not to have gone to war in Iraq?

Here from Jim Geraghty:

Moran’s close of the story: “And so, when pressed, Barack Obama says that he still would have opposed the surge but said he didn’t anticipate what people here call the Iraqi surge uprising against Al Qaeda and Shi’ite extremists. He said he didn’t anticipate that, but he is insisting that he is focusing forward on what needs to be done — setting that timetable for withdrawal.”

So he didn’t foresee the surge working, but as his adviser Susan Rice said, Obama “bows to nobody in his understanding of this world.”

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