Obama Iraq Advisor Sane on US Troops

Populist morons like Gravel, Kucinich, & Ron Paul love to preach instant withdrawal from Iraq the day after they would be inaugurated. But even anti-Bush stalwarts such as Juan Cole realize that the Hollywood druggie-dreams of imbeciles like Sean Penn et al. are real [remember that Penn & other drugged-out Hollyweirdos mostly dropped out of high school.]

This is not the first time the opinion of an adviser to the Obama campaign has differed with the candidate’s stated Iraq policy. In February, Mr. Obama’s first foreign policy tutor, Samantha Power, told BBC that the senator’s current Iraq plan would likely change based on the advice of military commanders in 2009. She has since resigned her position as a formal adviser.

The political ramifications of the disclosure are yet to be seen. The perception of a harder line in Iraq could help Mr. Obama combat charges by Senator McCain in a general election that Mr. Obama favors a hasty surrender and retreat in Iraq. But it could hurt the Obama campaign with anti-war voters in the Democratic primaries. Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Clinton, has called for withdrawing troops from Iraq, but an architect of the surge has told the Sun that she has been wary of a precipitous withdrawal. In a situation with some parallels to this one, Mr. Obama suffered some political damage on the trade issue when he called publicly for a renegotiation of NAFTA while a policy adviser reportedly met with Canadian officials and downplayed the chances of a NAFTA retreat.

Even ultra-left advisors of Obama may quail at a withdrawal of US forces and the consequent diminishment of American power and influence everywhere---including oil countries where the US still has to exert power to wield influence.

In his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg points out again and again how "liberals"
in power quickly succumb to the siren song of global power. Samantha Powers and now her successor are already aware of the real world, the one liberals never seem to get a grip on despite their self-styled "reality-based community."