Obama Attempts to Extract Foot

DURHAM, N.H., Feb. 12 — Senator Barack Obama of Illinois said Monday that he had misspoken when he suggested that the lives of more than 3,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq had been “wasted.”

As he arrived in New Hampshire, Mr. Obama said he would “absolutely apologize” to military families if they were offended by a remark he made in Iowa while criticizing the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

“What I would say — and meant to say — is that their service hasn’t been honored,” Mr. Obama told reporters in Nashua, N.H., “because our civilian strategy has not honored their courage and bravery, and we have put them in a situation in which it is hard for them to succeed.”

A New Hampshire reporter asked Mr. Obama whether he regretted the remark, made at a rally on Sunday that “we ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged, and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”

“Even as I said it,” Mr. Obama said Monday, “I realized I had misspoken.”

Well, he may be smoother and smarter than John Kerry, but his sympathies obviously lie in the same general ball park. This man is not fit to lead. This man is no "Commander-in-Chief."