Or so says the Senator from Illinois, whose security in Afghanistan was provided by the much maligned firm.

Sen. Barack Obama has not been a fan of private police like Blackwater in war zones, and some news outlets even reported that they were spurned for his trip last week to Afghanistan and Iraq. But Whispers confirms that Blackwater did handle the Democratic presidential candidate’s security in Afghanistan and helped out in Iraq. What’s more, Obama was overheard saying: “Blackwater is getting a bad rap.” Since everything appeared to go swimmingly, maybe he will take firms like Blackwater out of his sights, the company’s supporters hope.

Hat tip: Protein Wisdom

Now to put Obama’s recent observation in context. His official Senate website features a number of op-eds disparaging the private security firm. In one from the Chicago-Sun Times the group is likened to a “rogue militia” group:

Contractors shouldn’t be rogue militia, roaming the country shooting without justification and without consequences. This is especially true since the federal government has apparently hired out the Iraq war right under our noses: There are nearly as many private military employees there as troops.

In the same article the administration is also chastised for relying on a “shadow military.” Another featured op-ed, this time from the LA TImes, declares that such contractors should not be tasked with providing security to American diplomats.

But Congress should also debate the overarching issue: Which military and security functions should be outsourced in the first place? And which pose the potential to harm the national interest if delegated to the private sector? The traditional standard was that “mission critical” functions — jobs that would lose the war if botched — shouldn’t be outsourced. What little is known about the Pentagon’s use of security contractors indicates that standard is obsolete. But what should the new criteria be?

The Blackwater debacle suggests that at the very least, outsourcing the protection of U.S. diplomats operating in war zones — a national security imperative — is a bad idea.

Does Barack Obama support these views? If not, why are they featured on his website? If so, how does he reconcile such statements with his recent adventures? Having found that the group is getting a “bad rap,” is he also willing to admit his culpability in making that so?

In a speech from October of 2007 featured on Obama’s campaign website (which curiously lacks a search function), he stated, “We cannot win a fight for hearts and minds when we outsource critical missions to unaccountable contractors.”  Does this mean that, by accepting the security of Blackwater, Obama has contributed to our supposed inability to “win a fight for hearts and minds?”

Two must-read articles today concerning Iraq. One is by Michael Yon outlining the reasons he believes the war is effectively over and we have emerged victorious. Sorry libs. I trust Yon’s reporting on the war to be the most unbiased and in depth reporting available to the public. He’s spent more time there than pretty much anyone in the media. As if we couldn’t come to the same conclusion of victory on our own based on what is reported - or un-reported - elsewhere, but hearing Yon say it with such certainty is further encouragement.

The other concerns the messiah and his shameless attempts to play both sides of the Iraq issue. On the one hand he grudgingly admits the surge resulted in success, but still says he wouldn’t support it if he could do it all over again. Kind of reminds me of the questions Bush and Cheney got about whether they would still invade Iraq knowing what they know today about the WMDs that were never found. Though somehow it seems the press isn’t exploring these questions quite so passionately where Obama is concerned.

As an aside, I’m glad the surge worked and the war is “over” because my older brother is currently on a plane back there for the back four of a twelve month tour. I like to think he’s played no small part in the decline of the most visible insurgent weapon, the IED, over the last year. Proud of him. But there are still plenty of dead-enders over there to pose significant danger to our fighting men and women, so the prayers must never stop.

The New York Times, which just recently ran an editorial on Iraq authored by Obama, hasn’t any room in its daily rag of democratic talking points for a McCain rebuttal.

An editorial written by Republican presidential hopeful McCain has been rejected by the NEW YORK TIMES — less than a week after the paper published an essay written by Obama, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

The paper’s decision to refuse McCain’s direct rebuttal to Obama’s ‘My Plan for Iraq’ has ignited explosive charges of media bias in top Republican circles.

‘It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece,’ NYT Op-Ed editor David Shipley explained in an email late Friday to McCain’s staff. ‘I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written.’

In McCain’s submission to the TIMES, he writes of Obama: ‘I am dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it… if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president.’

NYT’s Shipley advised McCain to try again: ‘I’d be pleased, though, to look at another draft.’

[Shipley served in the Clinton Administration from 1995 until 1997 as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Presidential Speechwriter.]

A top McCain source claims the paper simply does not agree with the senator’s Iraq policy, and wants him to change it, not “re-work the draft.”

Just don’t you dare call them biased.

Consider this: does a campaign’s scrubbing of its website of all mentions of a candidate’s opposition to the surge mean that candidate never did oppose the surge? The Obama campaign seems to think so.

Over the weekend, as first reported by the New York Daily News, the Obama campaign website changed language from declaring “the surge is not working” to that which instead states: “despite the improved security situation, the Iraqi government has not stepped forward to lead the Iraqi people and to reach the genuine political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.”

An older Obama campaign “fact sheet” from Fall 2007 states more unequivocally that “THE SURGE IS NOT WORKING” since “the Iraqi government has not stepped up.”

George Orwell would be proud.

When Congress set up a number of benchmarks to measure the political progress in Iraq, democrats used the finding of success on only 8 of 18 counts as proof of failure.

“Today’s report from the president confirms what many had suspected — the war in Iraq is headed in a dangerous direction. The Iraqi government has not met the key political benchmarks it has set for itself and Iraqi security forces continue to lag well behind expectations. Our courageous troops continue to bear the burden for securing and rebuilding Iraq, while Iraq’s factions fight a deadly civil war,” Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement.

Now, however, 15 of 18 benchmarks have been met. Will democrats now apply the same standard and admit success? Fat chance. It seems the democrats intend to stubbornly play their violins right until their Titanic crashes into the ocean floor.

But McIntyre and other Democrats said only a few benchmarks has been actually met.

Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, said there is no military solution to the Iraq problem, no matter what White House said about the progress in Iraq.

At some point you’d almost think reality would at least force some honesty from the Obama campaign. He is, after all, supposed to be a new kind of politician, one who will bring Hope™ and Change™. But alas, intellectual honesty is probably too much to expect from a candidate that PowerLine convincingly suggests is the most dishonest in history.

Power Line reports on the following comment by an Obama spokesman:

This morning on MSNBC, Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, was asked about the success of the surge. He said: “We added 30,000 brave American troops, and violence is down, as everyone suspected it would be.”

Such a statement could only be made by someone who is either A) completely oblivious to reality or B) a liar.

Democrats, of course, suspected no such thing. Or if they did, they chose to blatantly lie about it and claim the surge would fail in order to continue their fervent war against Bush. Traveling back in time we have the following article to remind us where the Democrats actually stood:

In a strongly worded letter to President Bush, the Democratic leaders of Congress said Friday that they oppose any escalation, or “surge,” of U.S. troop strength in Iraq, as Bush is expected to propose next week.

Sending more American soldiers to Iraq will only endanger them, won’t bring stability and will only delay the day that Iraqis take responsibility for their own country, said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

…But the Democratic leaders rejected the idea of a surge under any circumstances: “Adding more combat troops will only endanger more Americans and stretch our military to the breaking point for no strategic gain. And it would undermine our efforts to get the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own future. We are well past the point of more troops for Iraq,” Reid and Pelosi wrote.

Gibbs’ idea of “everyone” does not even include his boss, Barack Obama, who features the following Senate floor speech regarding the surge on his website:

The President’s decision to move forward with this escalation anyway, despite all evidence and military advice to the contrary, is the terrible consequence of the decision to give him the broad, open-ended authority to wage this war back in 2002. Over 4 years later, we can’t revisit that decision or reverse some of the tragic outcomes, but what we can do is make sure we provide the kind of oversight and constraints on the President this time that we failed to do the last time.

I cannot in good conscience support this escalation. It is a policy which has already been tried and a policy which has failed. Just this morning, I had veterans of the Iraq war visit my office to explain to me that this surge concept is, in fact, no different from what we have repeatedly tried, but with 20,000 troops, we will not in any imaginable way be able to accomplish any new progress.

But I guess these are “just words.”

The Institute for Defense Analysis recently released the first volume from the Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP) look at Saddam’s terrorist connections, which set out to review over 600,000 documents captured following the fall of Saddam’s regime. The media, predictably, ignored the totality of the report’s findings and choose instead to focus on one single sentence: “This study found no ’smoking gun’ (i.e, direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda.” This lead to a flurry of media headlines as war critics rushed to be the first to breathlessly denounce President Bush, yet again.

From NRO:

ABC: Report Shows No Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda
CNN: Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda not linked, Pentagon says
New York Times: Study Finds No Qaeda-Hussein Tie
Washington Post: Study Discounts Hussein, Al-Qaeda Link
AFP: No link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda: Pentagon study
McClatchy: Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida

The media seems to be operating under the false assumption that Al Qaeda is the only terrorist group we are interested in. A more honest headline would have said something like: “Report finds Saddam supported Islamic terrorism,” since that’s what it actually said. Here are some quotes:

“Saddam’s interest in, and support for, non-state actors was spread across a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations.”

We aren’t at war with just Al-Qaeda.

Hmm, sounds like that should make Saddam a reasonable target in a “War on [Islamic] Terror.” Too bad the media and so many on the left seem to be under the mistaken impression that we’re really just in a war on Al-Qaeda, as if no other terrorist organization has ever attacked us, or wants to (they have, and they do). Back to th quotes:

“Despite their incompatible long-term goals, many terrorist movements and Saddam found a common enemy in the United States. At times these organizations worked together, trading access for capability.”

“Saddam’s regime often cooperated directly, albeit cautiously, with terrorist groups when they believed such groups could help advance Iraq’s long-term goals. The regime carefully recorded its connections to Palestinian terror organizations in numerous government memos. One such example documents Iraqi financial support to families of suicide bombers in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“Evidence of Saddam’s continuing interest and support for global terrorist activities is found in a 2002 annual report of the IIS M8 Directorate of Liberation Movements.”

“The IIS hosted thirteen conferences in 2002 for a number of Palestinian and other organizations, including delegations from the Islamic Jihad Movement and the Director General for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of al-Ahwaz.”

“In return for financial support, Palestinian terror groups, particularly Hamas, were willing to do Saddam’s bidding. Aftr the September 11th attacks on the United States, a Palestinian representative informed the Iraqis that Hamas had thirty-five armed terror cells around the world, mingled with refugee populations. These cells were in ‘France, Sweden, Denmark, and other places.’ The Palestinian boasted that these cells could shake America and force the United States to back out if it ever invaded Iraq.”

“Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda’s stated goals and objectives.”

“Evidence that was uncovered and analyzed attests to the existence of a terrorist capability and a willingness to use it until the day Saddam was forced to flee Baghdad by Coalition Forces.”

Obviously, the fact that no ties were found between Saddam and Al-Qaeda is newsworthy. But focusing on only that, and pretending like it’s the most important aspect of this report, does a disservice to the truth. We aren’t at war with just Al-Qaeda. There were a lot of important findings in this report that have been largely ignored. The overarching theme is clear: Saddam was willing to utilize, fund, support or train Islamic terrorist organizations when it suited his purposes. Removing regimes engaging in such behavior is of strategic interest to the United States.

But don’t take my word for it, read it yourself:

Their patience has payed off, there’s finally news to report!

2007 is deadliest year for U.S. in Iraq

The U.S. military on Tuesday announced the deaths of five more soldiers and one sailor, making 2007 the deadliest year for U.S. troops despite a recent downturn, according to an Associated Press count.

At least 853 American military personnel have died in Iraq so far this year ? the highest annual toll since the war began in March 2003, according to AP figures.

The grim milestone passed despite a sharp drop in U.S. and Iraqi deaths here in recent months, after a 30,000-strong U.S. force buildup. There were 39 deaths in October, compared to 65 in September and 84 in August.

A common statistical ploy: when the recent numbers aren’t to your liking, expand the timeframe. The media has been fretting lately because of the surge’s success in recent months. How to get around that…how to get around that? Oh, I know! Let’s not just look at recent months. Of course, all this obsession with death counts obscures the real question: Are we making progress toward victory? And at this time, that answer seems to be “yes”.

Democrats got their wish: Turkey is moving to start operations in northern Iraq.

The Turkish parliament Wednesday authorized cross-border military operations into northern Iraq to combat Kurdish separatist rebels as world leaders implored Turkey to delay any action.

In the hours before the parliament voted by a gaping margin of 507 to 19 to give Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan permission to launch strikes any time over the next year, Iraqi and NATO officials made a flurry of cautionary, last-minute telephone calls to the country’s top leaders.

Democrats, who not long ago routinely complained that the Bush administration needs to return to realism, have decided that it’s more important to stand on principle over an issue that affects absolutely no one still alive than to ensure victory in Iraq. Of course, neither realist nor idealistic foreign policy should dominate at all times regardless of the issue. But democrats have managed to be on the wrong side of that debate on almost every issue. They wrongly think we can contain Islamic Jihad by making concessions to thuggish dictators, but when it comes to a genocide that happened 100 years ago, idealism is more important than any impact their stance has on current world affairs. Ludicrous.

Just as General Petraeus is set to give his report before Congress on our efforts to defeat our enemies, Moveon.org is working to defeat its enemies, which just so happens to include General Petraeus. The modern left must destroy any who do not toe the line. General Petraeus’ crime is his refusal to ignore the facts on Iraq. This kind of assault is not only despicable, but it’s also damaging to our nation. The Soviet’s long counted on leftist “useful idiots” to undermine America and assist them during the Cold War. Now the jihadists are learning that they can rely on these same “useful idiots” to sabotage America in it’s current fight.

Democratic Representative from Washington Brian Baird has an op-ed in the Seattle Times in which he announces his new support for ongoing efforts in Iraq. Although he hilariously declares that the invasion of Iraq “may be one of the worst foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation,” Baird has also come to believe that the surge is working.

As a Democrat who voted against the war from the outset and who has been frankly critical of the administration and the post-invasion strategy, I am convinced by the evidence that the situation has at long last begun to change substantially for the better. I believe Iraq could have a positive future. Our diplomatic and military leaders in Iraq, their current strategy, and most importantly, our troops and the Iraqi people themselves, deserve our continued support and more time to succeed.

. . .It is just not realistic to expect Iraq or any other nation to be able to rebuild its government, infrastructure, security forces and economy in just four years. Despite the enormous challenges, the fact is, the situation on the ground in Iraq is improving in multiple and important ways.

Regardless of one’s politics or position on the invasion, this must be recognized and welcomed as good news.

Unfortunately, the idea that facts must be recognized is not something many Democrats are prepared to admit. They’d rather stand up in the Senate, House, or on the campaign trail and tell lies that serve their political ends but harm our efforts. Although Representative Baird is still wrong about a great many things, we should commend him for displaying a level of honesty not currently found in abundance within the Democratic party.