by Nick Vilmain and Andy Hansen
During a speech in Chicago on October 2nd, 2007, Senator Barack Obama made the following statement about his consistent opposition to the Iraq War:
“In this campaign, we’ve seen who has leadership to lead the country during difficult times—I did not only oppose the war but laid out reasons that turned out to be prescient over time, and I think that says something about my judgment.”
Obama has made the Iraq War a major tenet of his campaign because he sees other Democratic candidates are vulnerable on the issue. Is he being truthful in framing his position on the war?
What’s missing from the statement is that it leaves out specifically what his reasons were for opposing the war and when he voice those views publicly. His original speech was at an Anti-War Rally in Chicago on October 10th, 2002. In his speech he correctly predicted that:
“even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather then the best, impulses of the Arab world and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.”Senator Obama deserves credit for coming out against the war and forecasting some of the big concerns that would later surface, especially when 64% of Americans (at that time, anyway) favored the war in Iraq.
Obama was vocal in his opposition to the war in Iraq. At the time, however, that was his only option because he was only a state senator. As Obama was not in the U.S. Senate in 2002, and therefore was not under the same political pressures as those who voted for the war, it is a bit speculative to guess how he would have voted on the war if he had held that office.
While there is no doubt Senator Obama made an impassioned anti-war speech, it went largely unnoticed by news outlets. In fact, we were able to find only two Illinois newspapers that made note of his speech at all.
What was the political environment in Illinois when the conflict began? In 2002 the two Illinois senators split their vote on Iraq in 2002. Democrat Dick Durbin was one of the 23 senators who voted against the war. Republican Peter Fitzgerald voted for the war and with the majority.
Lesson: Senator Obama deserves credit for his early and vocal positions on the Iraq War. But he was not yet in the U.S. Senate at the time of the vote (making his comparisons with other Senators a bit shaky), and his public opposition went largely unnoticed in the news media.
