Obama Iraq speech

I have added a new feature to my website -- a del.icio.us link. It's on the right under the "What I'm Reading" section. This is an effort to make the stuff I'm reading on the web more accessible and up-to-date, as I haven't been pleased with how "google reader" has been working for me lately.

Anyway, today I read the full text of Barack Obama's Iraq speech on September 12, 2007, and I have to say I found it pretty persuasive. The speech includes some straight talk about what should have been done a few years ago and what can be done now. I admire Obama for maintaining his opposition to the Iraq war throughout the past six years, even though I initially supported the war in Iraq. I was misled, as much of the country was, by President Bush. I didn't believe there was an al-Qaida link, but I believed there was a vital national interest in going to Iraq. I wasn't sure about the WMDs, and I know I didn't believe the Hollywood types when they all said there weren't WMDs, as if they are experts, and it still grates on me that the Sean Penns of the world are gloating right now. The WMD issue is a moot point at this point. The question now is, how do we get out of Iraq with honor and without giving terrorists in Iraq a chance to claim victory? I think Obama lays out several promising ideas in how to do this. Calling on our regional allies is one of them, as well as getting the U.N. involved in the nation-building and spending more money on humanitarian aid to help stabilize the region. The call for an immediate troop draw-down may be a bit premature, but it's hard to resist Obama's reasoning on this -- if we shouldn't be there in a first place and our presence is causing much of the unrest, let's start to get rid of some of those causes. That's all for now. Read the speech, not the punditocracy that surrounds it.