"Oceana Was Always At War With Eurasia" of the Day

Barack Obama famously opposed the Iraq invasion and said the surge wouldn't work. [Then,] Obama dissented from the surge after it succeeded. Early this month, the President admitted that "we've achieved hard-earned milestones in Iraq" and essentially replicated the surge strategy in Afghanistan, effectively conceding Bush was right.

Almost as impressive is the flip-flop by the New York Times. Like most of the liberal media, the Times opposed Bush's surge, advocating instead exiting Iraq "without any more delay." Indeed, the paper spiked Senator McCain's suggested op-ed defending the surge. And for years, they (wrongly) insisted that the Iraq insurgency was overwhelmingly "homegrown."

More recently, the Times touted several Iraq surge opponents who were skeptical about increasing troop strength in Afghanistan. Especially given its penchant for printing classified intel damaging to national security, it's hard to not to conclude that the NYT scorned most initiatives against global terror because Bush backed them.

That was then. This is David Sanger's "news analysis" from the December 5th Times:

No one in the Obama White House voices much admiration for the inheritance left by Mr. Bush, so it was probably unintentional that when the Afghanistan strategy was announced on Tuesday, the rollout had echoes of the earlier one. Mr. Bush’s fact sheet on the surge carried the headline "The New Way Forward in Iraq." Mr. Obama’s speech carried the title "The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

But the commonalities end there. The Iraq surge worked in large part because there was powerful support in Anbar Province from the so-called Awakening, the movement by local Sunni tribes who rose up against extremists who were killing people, forcibly marrying local women and cutting off the hands of men who smoked in public. In Iraq, American officials believed that most leaders of a vigorous opposition, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, were foreigners.

The United States remains hopeful that it can capitalize on Afghan militias that have taken up arms against the Taliban in local areas, but a series of intelligence reports supplied to Mr. Obama since September found no evidence in Afghanistan of anything on the scale of the Iraqi Awakening movement. What’s more, in Afghanistan the extremists, the Taliban, are natives.

Conclusion: Bush was right, but this Administration will flip-flop forever. Meanwhile, the Times always alters facts to fit Democratic party politics.

(via Best of the Web, NY Sun)