I’ve been getting frustrated with the media’s insistence on conflating the choice to invade Iraq with the question of how to get out. Again and again, it’s suggested that politician X has changed his tune on Iraq because while he opposed the invasion in the first place, now he favors a measured withdrawal.

No, wrong. The choice to invade Iraq in the first place was and always will be a horrible and indefensible one. (And I will never accept the rationalizations of people like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry who voted for the war that they did so on the basis of bad information. They knew the situation, knew that weapons inspections hadn’t been given a chance, and knew even in 2003 that manipulation was this administration’s stock in trade; they were riding the political winds, no more, no less.) But that choice to invade has very little to do at this point with the choice to withdraw, and suggesting that someone who opposed the war is being inconsistent because now they’re saying we need to find a way to clean up the mess we’ve made in Iraq is sloppy at best, disingenuous at worst. We now have a strategic and moral imperative to resolve the crisis we’ve brought about there, and I think it’s profoundly irresponsible to talk about leaving until that’s done.

The latest instance of this I’ve seen is in Ken Silverstein’s November Harper’s profile of Barack Obama. The article’s general drift can be boiled down to one of my grandfather’s favorite sayings: “Never compare something bad to something worse”—i.e. Obama’s charm and passion may make him a better breed of politician, but he is still a politician nonetheless, as evidenced by his weaknesses for earmarks and lobbyists. Which is a thesis I don’t necessarily disagree with, but one piece of evidence Silverstein deploys to demonstrate Obama’s allegedly chameleon-like political tendencies is the war, and in doing so, I think that he, like others, confuses the issues of invading Iraq and withdrawing from it. In 2002, while still an Illinois state senator, Obama “savaged the Bush administration for its then obvious plans to invade,” Silverstein writes, but after reaching Congress, he “grew more measured in his position.” More measured how? “Obama continues to reject any specific timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, even as public opposition to the war grows and as the military rationale for staying becomes less and less apparent.”

I’m sorry, as the military rationale for staying becomes less and less apparent? Wouldn’t the military rationale have something to do with preventing civil war in a country at the center of the most volatile region of the world, next door to a country with a professed antipathy for the United States and undisguised nuclear ambitions? In my view, the military rationale for invading nearly four years ago was somewhat less than apparent. But since we did anyway, and since things have gone the way they’ve gone, the military rationale for staying is pretty much written on the wall. I’m a trifle skeptical of all the Obama idolatry, but criticizing him for the evolution of his position on Iraq is missing the point.