In an early morning memo, John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann claims Barack Obama's position on Iraq is designed only to keep his "left-wing base":
When it wasn't popular, John McCain said he would rather win a war that we were losing than win an election. Politics came second; country came first.Barack Obama has determined that he would rather lose a war that we are winning than lose an election by alienating his base. This is the reason Obama did not have to wait until his trip to declare his strategy. Iraq is fundamentally a political decision for Barack Obama, not a national security decision.
He has calculated that to maintain his left-wing base, he cannot adopt a strategy that is based upon conditions on the ground. For the best political position, Barack Obama has decided that his only politically acceptable position is a timetable out of touch with what is really happening in Iraq.
Yesterday, Scheunemann compared Obama to Bush in his inflexibility. Today, it's Donald Rumsfeld:
The American people deserve a commander-in-chief who puts their country first ahead of party, politics and self-interest. Time after time, that is what John McCain has done and what Barack Obama has failed to do. We cannot afford to replace a Rumsfeld strategy that refused for too long to acknowledge failure in Iraq with an Obama strategy that refuses to acknowledge success in Iraq.
Scheunemann should know: as part of his work helping the U.S. get into the war in Iraq, he was briefly Rumsfeld's 'consultant' on Iraq at the Pentagon.