General Obama calls for shifting troops to Afghanistan

Headline in today's Wall Street Journal: "Obama calls for shifting troops to Afghanistan."

On the first stop of his weeklong foreign tour, Sen. Barack Obama Sunday called for shifting U.S. military forces from Iraq to Afghanistan, which he called "the central front on our battle against terrorism."

One tiny problem: that announcement was made without consulting General Petraeus, seeing the situation in Iraq, listening to any of Iraq's leaders or consulting with other experts. But no one should be surprised: Obama has a long history of botched predictions made in a complete absence of information.

Last week Charles Krauthammer observed:

[What would Iraq] look like if what Obama had proposed at the beginning of '07 had occurred. He would have had all our troops out four months ago, which means we would have al-Queda in control of large elements of Iraq with a strong base... It means that Iran would have the control that it had before the central government kicked Iran and its cohorts, allies, and clients out of the southern areas of Iraq. It would have tremendous influence over Iraq.

And probably the central government would have a collapsed, and it would be in the middle of a civil war and possibly genocide.

The best argument against Obama, the best antiwar argument to use against him, is to say that if we had listened to him we'd be in a position where we would be looking at a strategic calamity on our hands, as I described, also, a humanitarian one, which would impel us to have a third Iraqi war.

Which could, of course, have also touched off a world war.

As Jimmy Carter reminds us daily, the price of presidential stupidity is high. Vote accordingly in 2008.

Update: Exhibiting all the courage of Carter: "after talking for two years about timetables to remove troops from Iraq, Barack Obama goes to Baghdad and wimps out... He didn't even bring it up with the Iraqi Prime Minister!"