There wasn’t much remarkable said at last night’s Democrat debate, but John McCain was able to find something nice and meaty to dig in to this morning.

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain mocked Democrat Barack Obama on Wednesday for saying he would take action as president “if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq.”

“When you examine that statement, it’s pretty remarkable,” McCain told a crowd in Tyler, Texas.

“I have some news. Al-Qaida is in Iraq. It’s called `al-Qaida in Iraq,’” McCain said, drawing laughter at Obama’s expense.

There is no question that Al Qaeda is in Iraq or has its mind set on attacks beyond that region, if this is somehow the new yard marker for the left that would justify a continued commitment. Obama is selling the notion that everything will be hunky dory if we leave Iraq, which on its face is a ludicrous statement. If there were a civil war going on right now that was resulting in gains for Al Qaeda while the American Armed Forces remain in Iraq and on the offensive, there is no reason to believe the situation would improve one iota with the withdraw of the largest stabilizing force.

Iraq would spiral downward and we would end up either reaping the consequences of surrender or sacrificing an exponentially greater amount of resources as we were forced to reoccupy the country. Obama doesn’t care about that, which is one of the most disturbing aspects of his candidacy.

Obama shot back that if we hadn’t gone in then there never would have been an Al Qaeda presence in Iraq. This is tantamount to using an argument over who set a fire as justification to not extinguish it, assuming that you generously accept the premise that the occupation brought Al Qaeda into play. As Allahpundit put it, “As soon as [Obama] gets that time machine built, expect this problem to be solved.”

Watching the cable news networks, the mainstream media tag seems to be that Obama didn’t really commit to using force in Iraq if Al Qaeda was shown to be “building a base there” during the debate, so John McCain’s criticism is unfair. It’s a pretty lame excuse from the MSM but one to be expected. The refutation for this is simple. The MSM position is even worse than Obama’s original statement because it goes against his stated policy of action in Pakistan and his calls for more commitment to the war effort in Afghanistan.

In other words, what would the savior do, sit around and twiddle his thumbs with Al Qaeda gaining control of Iraq? Seems like his position no matter how you spin it. Whatever it takes to get the kook base to the polls.
FullosseousFlap is also on this.

Gateway Pundit has an Al Qaeda created map detailing their presence in Iraq.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 3:07 pm and is filed under 2008 Race, Iraq, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.