Not that we haven't seen this before. Early in his contest against Ms. Clinton, Obama campaigned hard against the North American Free Trade Agreement. While he was doing so, he quietly dispatched one of his advisors to go and tell the Canadians that it was all for show.
But this one is much better. The most substantial point in Obama's case for himself has always been his opposition to the Iraq War, and his demand for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. forces from that country. Now we learn that when Obama was meeting with senior Iraqi leaders, he actually tried to delay negotiations that would have lead to an American draw down. From Amir Taheri at the New York Post:
WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.
"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview…
Though Obama claims the US presence is "illegal," he suddenly remembered that Americans troops were in Iraq within the legal framework of a UN mandate. His advice was that, rather than reach an accord with the "weakened Bush administration," Iraq should seek an extension of the UN mandate.
Now it's not hard to see what is going on here. The Obama campaign was afraid that an early withdrawal of at least some troops would make the Iraq war look like less of a failure, and so take away Obama's key issues.
So he was willing to act against this Administration's foreign policy and his own publically stated position on Iraq. Maybe Taheri gets the story wrong, but frankly, this looks like our man.
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