Obama Purges Iraq Criticism from Campaign Homepage

In a sign that Barack Obama is increasingly rattled by progress in Iraq, the campaign has removed its antiwar position paper - which attacked the Petraeus surge as a "failure" - from its homepage.

Here's a passage from an official campaign statement from December 2007:

“The stated purpose of the surge was to enable Iraq’s political leaders to reconcile. They have not done so. . . . Our troops fight and die in the 120 degree heat to give Iraq’s leaders space to agree, but they are not filling it. . . . The bar for success is so low that itis almost buried in the sand.” (source: Former Obama Supporters)

Here's more from the New York Daily News:

Barack Obama's campaign scrubbed his presidential Web site over the weekend to remove criticism of the U.S. troop "surge" in Iraq, the Daily News has learned.

The presumed Democratic nominee replaced his Iraq issue Web page, which had described the surge as a "problem" that had barely reduced violence.

"The surge is not working," Obama's old plan stated, citing a lack of Iraqi political cooperation but crediting Sunni sheiks - not U.S. military muscle - for quelling violence in Anbar Province.

The News reported Sunday that insurgent attacks have fallen to the fewest since March 2004.

Plus, Captain Ed has this:

The campaign says they regularly update the site to “reflect changes in current events”. However, the Obama campaign has yet to acknowledge that the changes came from a strategy he opposed and that he predicted would fail. Even more remarkably, he hasn’t changed his policy to incorporate the “changes in current events”. Instead, he just retooled his demand for timetabled withdrawals with a sop to the troops.

So far this week we've had the New Yorker cover controversy, and now the campaign's Iraq surge scrub-job at the official homepage.

This is looking to be one of Obama's worst weeks ever.