Barack Obama: That Was Not The Barack Obama I Knew

On the other, he was for it before he was against it. Or, was it the other way around.

Obama's "Evolving" Position on Iraq

From today's Boston Globe.

In July of 2004, the day after his speech at the Democratic convention catapulted him into the national spotlight, Barack Obama told a group of reporters in Boston that the United States had an "absolute obligation" to remain in Iraq long enough to make it a success.

"The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster," he said at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, according to an audiotape of the session. "It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died. . . . It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective."

So, Obama was "right all along?"

Well, he can be forgiven. He wasn't a "new kind of politician" then and Code Pink didn't own the party yet.