The issue of whether Barack Obama should spend more time in Iraq seems to be gaining quite a bit of media traction. John McCain and the Republican National Committee are pushing the matter pretty aggressively, and media outlets seem to perceive this as a new issue that didn’t play a role in the Democratic nominating fight.
But as campaign talking points go, this remains pretty weak, media interest notwithstanding. For one thing, Obama is planning an overseas trip, including time in Iraq, fairly soon. For another, all of this talk is a reminder of just how little American VIPs learn during codel visits.
TP highlighted a discussion on the subject yesterday with CNN’s Baghdad correspondent, Michael Ware.
CNN has the whole transcript, but Ware’s whole take is worth considering in detail if you can’t watch video clips online.
“Senator McCain has been here, what, more than half a dozen times,” Ware said. “And we’ve seen him get assessments of Iraq terribly wrong. So I wouldn’t be hanging my hat on the fact that your opponent has only been here once.
“And let’s not forget what do American officials get to see? Well, they get to see the rooftops of a lot of Iraqi houses as they chopper over them or across vast expanses of desert. They get to see rooms in the inside of U.S. bases in the Green Zone, both of which are divorced from reality. And they’ll get inundated with military briefings.
“Now, in these briefings, in the past, officials have been told the insurgency was in its death throes, there was no civil war, that Iranian influence wasn’t that big a problem, that Al Qaeda had been defeated. I mean, you really aren’t going to get much of a real picture. It’s almost by definition impossible.
“And General Petraeus, the commander in the war here, doesn’t pull any punches. So you almost could gain as much from having a private chat with him when he was last on Capitol Hill.”
Time magazine’s Brian Bennett, who has been stationed in Baghdad, added:
These delegations do suck up a lot of resources on the ground, and politicians staying for a few days get a limited view of what’s going on there. Part of that is because the State Department and the military don’t want a U.S. politician being kidnapped or blown up on their watch.
This is consistent with what Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), a decorated combat veteran and a former Secretary of the Navy, said when he called visits from congressional delegations “dog and pony shows.” Jonathan Finer added, “Prescient insights rarely emerge from a few days in-country behind the blast walls…. [T]hose who pass quickly through the war zone should stop ascribing their epiphanies to what are largely ceremonial visits.”
A friend of mine emailed this morning suggesting that Obama take a light mocking tone with a message like this:
“John McCain is right about one thing: he has done more photo ops in Iraq than I have. We remember them well. Let’s see, there was the one where Joe Lieberman had to tell him the difference btw Sunni and Shia. Oh, and then the one where he needed half our military presence to walk through a supposedly safe market, inspiring a group of Sunni militants — or were they Shia, who can tell the difference, right John? — to bomb the same market a few days later. I would commend John McCain for taking the long and dangerous trip to Iraq, if his visits there didn’t always make the war longer and the country more dangerous.”
Sounds good to me.