The Daily Background

The HuffPo:

The McCain campaign implied on Wednesday that Barack Obama’s commitment to preventing a future genocide was not sincere, attacking the Democratic candidate during his appearance at the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem.

In an early morning press release, entitled “Obama on Genocide,” McCain aide Tucker Bounds emailed reporters a quote from Obama’s appearance in which the Illinois Democrat reiterated the cry “never again.” He followed that quote with one taken a year ago from an interview that the Senator gave with the Associated Press in which he said that genocide or humanitarian crises were not a prerequisite for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq (a statement he has since walked back)

“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces,” said Obama, “then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now.”

The message was fairly explicit: Obama’s commitment to stopping future Holocausts is in doubt. Asked for clarification, McCain aide Michael Goldfarb responded:

“Today he says ‘never again.’ A year ago stopping genocide wasn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces in Iraq. Doesn’t that strike you as inconsistent?”

When Obama made his original comments, what he meant was– and this was clear from the context at the time for anyone who read what he actually said– that US military decisions have not historically been made on the basis of stopping genocide (regardless of whether that’s right or wrong). If that had historically been the US military’s top priority, then we would have intervened in Rwanda, the Congo, Sudan, Cambodia, and all number of places dating all the way back to the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

Barack Obama: soft and inconsistent on genocide. The latest unscrupulous attack from John McCain and his buddies over at the RNC.

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