I never really cared much about what Obama was saying in regard to Iraq, because he was mostly mollifying gullible progressives by appearing to say what they wanted to hear. If you parsed his words closely, I felt that he was expressing decent intelligence about matters. Obama’s main criticism was that we should have stuck to Afghanistan and not invaded Iraq. I was never even close to convinced that our foreign policy would substantially change if Obama got elected, and I said that often at the time. And taa-daa!

Here’s the thing about using counterinsurgency tactics to combat 3rd generation warfare. The credit should go to Bush or even to McCain. The tactics are emergent principles that folks on the ground developed and fought for and doggedly used and showed were the best practices. [Anyone interested should read The Sling and the Stone. Obama should, if he hasn't yet.]

Instead of turning these approaches into a political football game about who is a smarter military leader, let’s acknowledge the work of all the people on the ground who have worked so hard for these approaches to emerge. They are the ones who deserve the credit. McCain deserves credit for championing this approach, which showed some political courage, even though these ideas were quickly becoming au courant during the time when the original Iraq approaches were failing to get results.