Barack Obama deserves some credit. He was right. When President Bush decided to invade Iraq, Obama was one of the few politicians outspoken against the war from the start. Several thousand lives and $1.9 trillion later, one can’t help but wish more had taken up Obama’s viewpoint back then. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way.

Invading Iraq was clearly a mistake, but there’s no going back. What’s done is done. The only question that matters now is: what is the best way to proceed from here? Barack Obama’s answer to that question is both unsettling and frequently changing.

Early in Obama’s campaign for President, he advocated an immediate troop withdraw from Iraq. This idealist stance, like many of Obama’s positions, might sound like sunshine and rose pedals on paper, but in reality, it would be disaster. Apparently Obama has comes to realize this. He now advocates a “responsible, phased withdraw” that will operate on a timetable of having our troops out of the region within 16 months.

Obama possesses a certain naivety that is very common among liberals who have spent most of their time in the field of academia: he thinks that just because he is a nice guy who wouldn’t harm a fly, that everyone else must be equally nice. This failure to understand how the world works is what drives his socialist taxation policies as well as the degree of confidence he and his supporters display regarding his chances of seizing the Oval Office.

What Obama doesn’t realize about Middle Eastern power-players like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the leaders of Hamas is that they aren’t Harvard-educated pacifists who just want to pay a fair price for their arugula. These guys are power-hungry lunatics who wish to be major players in the international community.

By withdrawing our troops from Iraq on an arbitrary schedule rather than based on the completion of strategic objectives, we send the message to the Middle East that we won’t do anything. In other words, we are giving a guy dumb enough to think that there are no gays in his country (Ahmadinejad) a hall-pass to do whatever he pleases. It’s worth mentioning that this same guy is currently developing a nuclear program.

Does this mean Ahmadinejad, with suddenly no U.S. presense to deter him, will use the threat of nuclear force to invade an unstable Iraq? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows what that nutjob is thinking? The point is, under Obama’s policies, the choice is his!

America can play a big game of “cross your fingers” by following Obama’s troop withdraw plan. Hey… maybe it will work! But if history tells us anything, picking a fight in the Middle East and then leaving before the job is done is a recipe for bigger and more costly problems down the road.