In response to the attack ads being run by the McCain campaign and McCain-sympathetic 527 groups, Barack Obama reminds 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft that, contrary to the McCain mythology, the Iraq War didn't start in 2007 with the surge.

Download Download

Kroft: The McCain campaign, the last day or two, has been running nothing but ads talking about you and the surge…that you were opposed to the surge.

Obama: That's all they had to talk about. You notice that, according to the McCain mythology, I guess the Iraq war started with the surge. They seem to forget that there were five years before that where they got everything wrong, where they anticipated that we would be greeted as liberators. Where they said this would be easy. These are John McCain's quotes. That this would all pay for itself. Because the Iraqi oil revenues would more than cover it. The fact of the matter is that John McCain has been consistently wrong on Iraq. And now's the time for us to bring this to a close. Even the Iraqi prime minister and the Iraqi government recognize it's time to have a time frame. The Bush administration has talked about time horizons. And John McCain, moving forward, is the only one who stubbornly clings to reasons to stay in Iraq.

If you haven't read Barack Obama's prescient Iraq War protest speech, I highly suggest you familiarize yourself with it. Keep in mind while you're reading that this was delivered in 2002 when it was politically consequential to speak out against the invasion of Iraq, and when the CW was such that Iraq definitively had WMD and would be a cake walk. It's pretty amazing that a "naive State Senator" could have been so right while the Senate's foreign policy "expert" could be so wrong.