Obama doesn’t know Iraq from Afghanistan

What a dipshiite!  From ABC News:

ABC News’ David Wright and Sunlen Miller Report: Sporting a shiny new American flag pin at an appearance in Rush Limbaugh’s hometown, Sen. Barack Obama came up with some novel reasons why the U.S. may be struggling in the war in Afghanistan.

“We don’t have enough capacity right now to deal with it — and it’s not just the troops,” Obama, D-Ill., told a crowd in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Obama posited — incorrectly — that Arabic translators deployed in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan — forgetting, momentarily, that Afghans don’t speak Arabic.

“We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan,” Obama said.

The vast majority of military translators in both war zones are drawn from the local population.
Naturally they speak the local language. In Iraq, that’s Arabic or Kurdish. In Afghanistan, it’s any of a half dozen other languages — including Pashtu, Dari, and Farsi.

No sooner did Obama realize his mistake — and correct himself — but he immediately made another.

“We need agricultural specialists in Afghanistan, people who can help them develop other crops than heroin poppies, because the drug trade in Afghanistan is what is driving and financing these terrorist networks. So we need agricultural specialists,” he said.

So far, so good.

“But if we are sending them to Baghdad, they’re not in Afghanistan,” Obama said.

Iraq has many problems, but encouraging farmers to grow food instead of opium poppies isn’t one of them. In Iraq, oil fields not poppy fields are a major source of U.S. technical assistance.

There are other infrastructure problems both countries share that U.S. advisors have struggled to address — a lack of safe roads, schools, adequate electricity, etc. — but Obama did not mention these.

Obama’s overall point may well be true: that U.S. efforts in Iraq have come at the expense of the battle against al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Still it’s not asking too much to expect the man many say will soon be the Democratic nominee to cite the right facts to back up his thesis.

Facts?  The left doesn’t need no stinkin’ facts!  They’ve gone this long without facts, so why change now?

Barry O’s team responds with righteous indignation, and in the process, keeps tasting their Reeboks:

…This poorly researched and written piece is inaccurate in that it just completely ignores the need for Arabic translators in Afghanistan, and the need for agricultural specialists in Iraq. It is irresponsible to report such issues so matter-of-factly without checking out the actual facts. …

The “the need for Arabic translators in Afghanistan”?  The author didn’t let that nugget of ignorance go unanswered:

As for the point about Arabic translators needed for Afghanistan, the Obama campaign points to the well-documented presence of foreign fighters there, many of whom do speak Arabic. However, these folks are mostly shooting at NATO troops, not talking to them.

Then again, dude wants to negotiate with terrorist nations like Iran.  Such a predisposition towards lethal naivete would explain this Freudian slip.

How much more proof do you need before coming to the only reasonable conclusion, that the dude is an empty suit?