When the situation in Iraq was going badly, Barack Obama wanted us to retreat. When the surge took hold and the situation in Iraq improved, Barack Obama wanted us to retreat. No turn in Iraq went unstoned in Obama’s commitment to retreat and surrender.

Not any more. Obama has thrown his old positions under the bus. And, for a guy whose campaign claims to get the net, he’s done an extremely dumb thing — he purged his website of his former positions. Apparently he’s never heard of a cache.

The presumed Democratic nominee replaced his Iraq issue Web page, which had described the surge as a “problem” that had barely reduced violence.

“The surge is not working,” Obama’s old plan stated, citing a lack of Iraqi political cooperation but crediting Sunni sheiks – not U.S. military muscle – for quelling violence in Anbar Province. . . .

Obama’s campaign posted a new Iraq plan Sunday night, which cites an “improved security situation” paid for with the blood of U.S. troops since the surge began in February 2007.

It praises G.I.s’ “hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics and enormous sacrifice.”

Gone are Obama’s days of criticizing the surge, which he claimed was sure to fail. It’s like L. Ron Hubbard writing Scientology. Every aspect of the religion is subject to revision until it is published for Tom Cruise to jump on a couch and attract creepy cultists and far left automatons. And even then the second edition can edit out inconvenient gibberish the Messiah originally wrote some staffer accidentally inserted without the foreknowledge or permission of the Messiah.

Is there no position this man will not take that he will later repudiate? Is there nothing this man will not say or do to get elected?

That’s what inexperience and ineptitude get you. Always having to tuck tail and run the other way as fast as you can. This is what we lawyers sometimes denote as a “continuing pattern and practice.”