Barack Obama's campaign has been spinning their candidate's position on the surge for the past two months. First, David Axelrod said on MSNBC that Obama "never disputed the fact that if you throw a surge of American soldiers in an area that you can make a difference." A week later Obama's communications director Robert Gibbs said that "there's no doubt that the security situation has improved, much as everybody admitted it would if we put more troops on the ground."
Obama himself has engaged in this spin, most recently telling Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press "I know that there's that little snippet that you ran," referring to a clip from January 2007 in which Obama said the surge would "do the reverse" of solving sectarian violence.
But, Obama told Brokaw, "there were also statements made during the course of this debate in which I said there's no doubt that additional U.S. troops could temporarily quell the violence. But unless we saw an underlying change in the politics of the country, unless Sunni, Shia, Kurd made different decisions, then we were going to have a civil war and we could not stop a civil war simply with more troops."
Jake Tapper asked the Obama campaign to provide him "with any information of Sen. Obama saying the surge would reduce violence 'during the course of this debate' over the surge."
Tapper writes:
The earliest quote they provided from Obama suggesting the surge might reduce violence came in March 2007, when Obama told Iowa's WQAD that "I don't think there's been any doubt that if we put U.S. troops in that, in the short term, we might see some improvement in certain neighborhoods because the militias are going to fade back into the community. That's one of the characteristics of what we've seen. The problem is that we don't see any change in the underlying dynamic which is Shia militias infiltrating the government, Sunni insurgents continuing the fight, that's the essence of the problem and unless we say that we're going to occupy Iraq indefinitely, we're gonna continue to see problems. I would disagree the bombings and the deaths that have been occurring over the last several weeks, you hadn't seen any real significant difference over what we've seen in the last year."
From there, it doesn't seem he made any comments along those lines until August 2007.
As Tapper points out, Obama's tepid statement that violence would "temporarily" go down "in certain neighborhoods" statement occurred after relevant votes and debate on the surge in February of 2007.
(Hat tip: Ed Morrissey)
