Gut Check

Best of the Web Today - WSJ.com: "Barack Obama got to be the Democratic presidential nominee in large part because he opposed from the start the use of U.S. military force to liberate Iraq. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, by contrast, both voted for it. But an exchange in Saturday night's forum with Rick Warren raises serious questions about Obama's honesty vis-à-vis Iraq. Here it is:

Warren: What's the most significant--let me ask it this way. What's the most gut-wrenching decision you ever had to make and how did you process that to come to that decision?

Obama: Well, you know, I think the opposition to the war in Iraq was as tough a decision as I've had to make. Not only because there were political consequences, but also because Saddam Hussein was a real bad person, and there was no doubt that he meant America ill. But I was firmly convinced at the time that we did not have strong evidence of weapons of mass destruction, and there were a lot of questions that, as I spoke to experts, kept on coming up. Do we know how the Shia and the Sunni and the Kurds are going to get along in a post-Saddam situation? What's our assessment as to how this will affect the battle against terrorists like al Qaeda? Have we finished the job in Afghanistan?

But Obama's famous anti-Iraq speech, which he delivered Oct. 26, 2002, depicted the decision as anything but profound:

I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

The speech did include a condemnation of Saddam, but it was a pro forma one--not a concession to the other side, but an inoculation against the charge that Obama was siding with a vicious dictator. In his speech, Obama gave no quarter to those who disagreed with him: no indication that there were any valid points on their side, or even that they might have been arguing in good faith.

Now Obama expects us to believe that opposing what he understood at the time to be no more than a "cynical attempt" by "armchair, weekend warriors" to "shove their own ideological agendas down our throats" and an "attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us" was the most gut-wrenching decision of his entire life.

Could it be that Obama did in fact agonize over the decision but decided not to share that fact with the voters until now? Perhaps, but why? Earlier in Saturday's interview, Warren asked Obama to name an incident in which he "went against your own best interest, for the good of America." Here is the relevant part of that response:

When I opposed the initial decision to go into war in Iraq. That was not a popular view at the time. And I was just starting my campaign for the United States Senate. And I think there were a lot of people who advised me, you should be cautious. This is going to be successful. The president has a very high approval rating and you could end up losing the election as a consequence of this.

If Obama told Warren the truth about his own deliberations in 2002, then he misled the voters back then by concealing his sympathy for (notwithstanding his ultimate disagreement with) what he believed to be a politically expedient position. Perhaps a psychiatrist could offer some elaborate explanation of why he would do this, but Occam's razor suggests that what Obama is saying now is simply at variance with the truth.