Barack Obama made a big deal out of John McCain?s saying U.S. troops in Iraq were down to a pre-surge level when they aren?t ? yet.
Combat troops will be down to that number by the end of next month. Obama is technically correct, but misleading.
The slam at McCain is like saying Obama concocted a bald-faced fabrication when he said his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz at the end of World War II ? it was actually Buchenwald ? or picking on his intellectual prowess when he said he visited 57 states.
That number really came out of his mouth. It happened for reasons of exhaustion, but, compared with McCain?s overstatement on troop withdrawal, is dumbfounding.
The larger Obama mistake lately was his pointing to Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon and John Kennedy as examples of presidents doing what he had pledged to do: meet enemy leaders such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran or Hugo Chavez of Venezuela without preconditions.
The facts have by now been well-rehearsed by critics. FDR and Truman did no such thing (the meetings with Josef Stalin don?t count because he was an ally at the time), Nixon?s meeting with Mao Zedong of China was elaborately prepared ? there were all sorts of preconditions ? and Kennedy?s meeting with Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union was disastrous. The Soviet boss apparently figured Kennedy was a weak-kneed amateur, and may thus have been emboldened to take steps leading to the Cuban missile crisis.
As a candidate of late, Obama has been reinventing history. If he becomes president, he will be making history, and the danger is that out of inexperienced naiveté, he will endanger national security by handing Iraq over to terrorists.
Jay Ambrose is a former Washington, D.C., opinion writer and editor of two dailies.
