Barack Obama, July of last year:

Senator McCain said – just months ago – that “Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq.” I could not disagree more. Our troops and our NATO allies are performing heroically in Afghanistan, but I have argued for years that we lack the resources to finish the job because of our commitment to Iraq. That’s what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said earlier this month. And that’s why, as President, I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.

Today, Marc Ambinder shares a bit of thinking from within the White House: “Why send soldiers to die if, maybe, you just can’t win?”

If Obama thinks the war is unwinnable, it would have been nice for him to tell the American public during the campaign, instead of completely reversing himself on a key provision of his foreign-policy vision less than a year into his presidency. Why, if we didn’t know any better, we might think that Obama was dovish and unwilling to defy his party’s pacifist grassroots the whole time, and that all of his “this is a war that we have to win” talk during the campaign was empty window-dressing to hide an out-of-the-mainstream worldview.