Thursday, November 26, 2009

Opinion

Robert Schlesinger

Sarah Palin's "Iraq Trip"—All the Way up to the Border

September 15, 2008 12:01 PM ET | Robert Schlesinger | Permanent Link | Print

I asked last week whether Sarah Palin had herself ever been to Iraq, and a few readers chided me and explained that yes, she had. We now know that like so much else involving the governor, it's not that straightforward.

Given that it was her "trip of a lifetime," Sarah Palin and her aides seem to have an awfully tough time recalling its details. Like the fact that the Iraq leg of her trip consisted of going to a checkpoint at the Kuwait-Iraq border.

Yes, it seems that Sarah Palin has been to Iraq—perhaps a few feet into Iraq. Is that enough to pass the John McCain qualified-to-talk-about-Iraq test?

This from a piece by Bryan Bender in Saturday's Boston Globe:

Sarah Palin's visit to Iraq in 2007 consisted of a brief stop at a border crossing between Iraq and Kuwait, the vice presidential candidate's campaign said yesterday, in the second official revision of her only trip outside North America.

Following her selection last month as John McCain's running mate, aides said Palin had traveled to Ireland, Germany, Kuwait, and Iraq to meet with members of the Alaska National Guard. During that trip she was said to have visited a "military outpost" inside Iraq. The campaign has since repeated that Palin's foreign travel included an excursion into the Iraq battle zone.

But in response to queries about the details of her trip, campaign aides and National Guard officials in Alaska said by telephone yesterday that she did not venture beyond the Kuwait-Iraq border when she visited Khabari Alawazem Crossing, also known as "K-Crossing," on July 25, 2007.

Note that this is the second revision—the first was acknowledging that the Ireland leg of the trip was in fact just a fueling stop.

I ask again simply for the sake of amusement: John McCain spent weeks or months arguing that Barack Obama was unqualified to talk about Iraq because the Illinois senator had not been to the country recently and so did not have any sense of the situation on the ground. By that same logic, shouldn't Sarah Palin not be qualified to speak about the issue? Presumably her minutes by the border didn't impart her with great expertise on the ground situation.

Of course, the answer is that that line of attack was—like so much else coming from the McCain camp—not serious. It was a cheap and convenient political attack line.

And even if it was a serious criticism, applying it evenly would require a level of shame or conscience the McCain campaign sorely lacks.

Tags: Iraq | Iraq war (2003-) | presidential election 2008 | running mates | Sarah Palin

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Reader Comments

SARAH IS LOVED BY ALL AMERICANS

Please do not presume to speak for me. I sooooo do not love Sarah.

It will do no good but, Barack Obama is not a muslim. Even if he was, I don't think that would make him as dangerous for our country as Sarah and John. On the one hand, you have a vice presidential candidate who quite honestly has no experience, knowledge, or educational background for the job. On the other hand, you have a 72 year old POW who honestly can say his best days are behind him. This is not the John McCain of 2000. This is an angry, know it's the last chance to be president, say anything, do anything shell of who he once was. Barack Obama/Joe Biden could run naked down the street, snorting coke off the median in the highway, everyday between now and Nov.4th, and I'd still vote for them before I'd cast a vote for that looney toon McCain/Palin ticket.

Wow... you seem to have a fixation on small things

O.K. Palin a governor. Governors typically do not do a lot of foreign travel. So why do you give a damn whether she visited a Iraq border post or not? It doesn't matter. Duh..... Stop the stupid "gotcha" reporting and report on her, and maybe even Obama's, policy positions. Duh.....

I will point out that Palin visited the troops as a "lowly governor" long before "THE ONE", a high U.S. Senator, decided he need a photo op as part of his run for President. So far, she has shown superior qualifications and character.

Let me be the first to congratulate Tom Of OK, who has the intellectual courage to say what he means and not beat around the bush like so many journalists and TV parrots who have to give the news the advertisers and sponsors want to hear....Palin wants us to join the "Drill baby Drill" group and work our way into energy sufficiency and Obama is busy collecting contributions from eveybody but could not even do very much as a senator....our middle class voters will vote for the most honest and capable candidates, and that is the way it should be in a real democracy.....

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Robert Schlesinger is a deputy editor at U.S. News and World Report and oversees all opinion editorial content. He is the author of White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters.

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