Fletcher Farrar: When will Obama find his voice on Iraq?

[Tweed]

http://www.illinoistimes.com/gbase/Gyrosite/Content?oid=oid%3A3916

"When U.S. Sen. Barack Obama was in Springfield last weekend for a town meeting with military veterans about the sorry state of veterans’ benefits, he missed a good chance to talk to the vets about the war in Iraq.

He had passed up an earlier chance to address the issue when Newsweek interviewed him for its Dec. 27 cover story, “Who’s next 2005.” “The Dems’ freshest face has a new challenge —” declared the magazine, “to help his party relocate its moral core.” The article mentioned that Obama was an “early opponent” of the war, but that was all it said. Obama’s fresh approach to moral values requires a “new narrative” that employs “power and mystery” to restore “timeless values.” But, so far as we can tell from Newsweek, it doesn’t involve ending a bad war.

With the veterans in Springfield, he stayed on message and out of trouble. Declaring that the Illinois disability-compensation system is “broken,” he quoted George Washington: “The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional as to how they perceive the veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation.” It would have been easy to go from there to say that until we can take care of the old disabled veterans, we shouldn’t be making so many new ones. According to the Pentagon, about 10,000 U.S. troops have been wounded in Iraq, many with severe injuries they would have died of in earlier wars. And thousands more are returning from Iraq mentally crippled from the effects of posttraumatic stress disorder . But Obama — like other Democrats in post-election Washington — hasn’t found his voice yet on the war itself.

I’m not sure that criticism of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy would have been all that controversial with the veterans. The few I interviewed at random at the town meeting expressed little support for the war. Bill Quick of Mt. Vernon, state commander of the Amvets, noted a general feeling among veterans that “it’s better to fight the enemy over there than over here.” But he said that few veterans are pleased with the way the Iraq war is going. “We’ll all be glad when it’s over.” Dennis Guernsey of Springfield, a Vietnam veteran who is past state commander of the Disabled American Veterans, was more adamant: “I think going into Iraq was a big mistake. It’s the first time I know of when we did preemptive strikes. We had no reason to do it. If I had the power to do anything, I would be bringing the troops back home.”"

Great article, Farrar (who is the President of the Illinois Times, arguably downstate's only leftist newspaper) sums up the recent Obama situtation so well. A must read for all DUers.

[alittlelark]

1. Not in Illinois, but I hope it comes soon.

Really.....Really.....soon.