"Presidential Candidate Obama's statements in and about Iraq in the past 24 hours have been nothing less than shameless and disgraceful."

So says Steve Schippert at http://www.threatswatch.org/, and I couldn't have said it better.

Schippert was reacting to Senator Obama's disingenuous comments on the "Surge" in Iraq. On Tuesday's ABC World News Tonight, he said that despite the improved situation in Iraq, he would still not support it even if he had to do it over again.

That's bad enough, but Obama proceeded to suggest that the new counterinsurgency strategy implemented by General Petreaus was merely incidental to the undeniably improved security conditions in Iraq. Schippert, a former Marine, knows something about counterinsurgency. And one of the things he knows about counterinsurgency is that Obama knows nothing about counterinsurgency. I encourage you to read the article here.

Obama wants us to believe that the undeniable progress in security in Iraq can be credited entirely to the "Anbar Reawakening," the Sunni revolt against Al Qaeda in western Iraq that emerged prior to the Surge. Incredibly, Obama would have us believe that this "reawakening" could have defeated Al Qaeda, and brought about the improved security quite apart from the new counterinsurgency strategy and the surge in troop strength.

This is utter nonsense.

But if that is nonsense, then the suggestion of the Obama team that the increased security situation in Iraq resulted from the Democratic wins in the November 2006 elections is nonsense on stilts. The Weekly Standard blog called our attention to this preposterous line of argument advanced by Lawrence Korb on PBS's Newshour:

KORB. "What began to turn things around in Iraq was, in 2006, after the Democrats won control of the Congress, the -- what they called the Sunni insurgents became known as the Sons of Iraq -- you had the Al Anbar awakening -- said that they would team up with us to go after al-Qaida in Iraq, because al-Qaida in Iraq had been so violent, the things they had done. And they realized that we were not going to be there forever.

This is the deal, that that has gotten the violence down in Al Anbar Province, which is where it was the heaviest. And then, even before the surge was completed, in February 2007, Sadr, Muqtada al-Sadr, told his militia to lay down their arms.

MARGARET WARNER: But are you saying that the surge, the 20,000 additional combat forces, aren't a significant factor in why things are more peaceful?

LAWRENCE KORB: It was a factor, but was not nearly as big a factor as the Sunni insurgents laying down their arms, because the -- we now call them the Sons of Iraq. We are paying them. We are training them. It was about 100,000 of them. But this is a deal we could have had in 2004. We didn't take it. We took it in 2006, because -- after the election.

Fortunately, Max Boot was able to correct the nonsense:

MAX BOOT: First, let me, if I could just very quickly, correct a misapprehension that Larry Korb is perpetrating here, the same one that Barack Obama has perpetrated before, which is to say that the success that we are seeing in Iraq as a result of the Democratic victory in the November 2006 election.

Now, that is just bizarre, because anybody who has been to Iraq knows that the Al Anbar awakening....

Anybody who has been to Iraq knows that the Al Anbar awakening began in September of 2006, months before the Democrats took office in the United States. And anybody who has been to Iraq recently also knows that there is no way that these brave Sunnis or the Sons of Iraq would be risking their lives if they saw that American troops were on their way out.

The only reason they are willing to stand and fight against al-Qaeda is because they know that the commitment of the United States remains secure and that we will stand with them.

See a transcript and video of the Korb-Boot exchange here.

Finally, kudos toThe Weekly Standard, whose blog called our attention to the comments of MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Harold Ford, Jr. (current chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council!), both of whom agreed that Obama's statements on the surge are utterly laughable.

Laughable. Maybe. Shameless and disgraceful. Definitely.