Obama: Iraq is War of Choice

Barack Obama, at a New Mexico campaign rally yesterday, denounced the Iraq war as a "war of choice," one that has distracted from the "war of necessity" in Afghanistan, at 1:40 minutes into the video:

It's frankly mindboggling that Obama continues to pander relentlessly to the Democratic Party's radical base. The Iraq war has been won, and even the most implacable opponents have come around to the pro-victory side.

Obama's claim that Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan is one of the latest antiwar memes seeking to delegitmize the Bush administration and minimize the heroism of American troops serving under the Petraeus command.

Christopher Hitchens previously took down the false war of choice/war of necessity dichotomy:

If we had left Iraq according to the timetable of the anti-war movement, the situation would be the precise reverse: The Iraqi people would now be excruciatingly tyrannized by the gloating sadists of al-Qaida, who could further boast of having inflicted a battlefield defeat on the United States. I dare say the word of that would have spread to Afghanistan fast enough and, indeed, to other places where the enemy operates. Bear this in mind next time you hear any easy talk about "the hunt for the real enemy" or any loose babble that suggests that we can only confront our foes in one place at a time.

Yes, keep this in mind as well, when considering the fact that a third of voters say they can't trust Obama on national security.