Good Words, Wrong Man

Patrick McIlheran had a column in Wednesday's paper touting the surge and how it made Iraq safe for Senator Barack Obama to visit there. I won't get into whether or not the surge worked (it seems it just moved the enemy from one spot to another, but didn't get rid of them). But I would like to highlight the last paragraph of Paddy's column (emphasis mine):

Not that McCain should expect gratitude, which is for monuments, not elections. But that events have proved one candidate so right and the other so spectacularly wrong tells us something about their respective ability to judge what to do in the next crisis. That really is an issue worth voting on.

This passage struck me as being ironic, coming from McIlheran. Even while McIlheran was touting the supposed effectiveness of the surge, he was missing the key point to the whole thing.

There would have been no need of a surge, if there was no al Qaeda in Iraq. And there would have been no al Qaeda in Iraq, if our country hadn't bought into the false bill of goods that Bush, McCain and squawkers like McIlheran was selling.

But it was Obama, not McCain, that saw the folly of going into Iraq, which was contained, and ignoring the real enemy, bin Laden, who was holed up in Afghanistan.

So, let us review again what McIlheran wrote:

But that events have proved one candidate so right and the other so spectacularly wrong tells us something about their respective ability to judge what to do in the next crisis. That really is an issue worth voting on.

I am sure Obama would thank McIlheran for the vote of confidence.