From a member of the 101st Airborne Division who served in Iraq:

Earlier this year, I spent five days in Iraq, walking the same streets in Baghdad where I had served two years earlier as an infantry platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division.

The visit reinforced for me not only the immense complexity of the war – so often lost in our domestic political debate – but also the importance of taking the time to visit Iraq to talk with the soldiers and Marines serving on the front lines in order to grasp the changing dynamics of a fluid battlefield.

It is for this reason that the failure of Sen. Barack Obama to travel to Iraq over the past two and a half years is worrisome, and a legitimate issue in this presidential election.

Since his election to the United States Senate in 2004, Mr. Obama has traveled to Iraq just once – in January 2006. This was more than a year before Gen. David Petraeus took command and the surge began. It was also several months before Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government came into office. Although Mr. Obama frequently criticizes the Iraqi leader on the campaign trail, he has never actually met him.

Mr. Obama’s conduct is strikingly different from that of Sen. John McCain, who has been to Iraq eight times since 2003 – including three times since surge forces began to arrive in Baghdad. The senior senator from Arizona has made it his mission to truly understand what is happening on the ground, in all its messy reality.

All partisan politics aside, there’s little doubt that the war in Iraq is one of the biggest and most complex issues of this campaign season.  Given that importance and complexity, how can we take seriously the pronouncements on Iraq offered by a candidate whose last visit to the country came years before some of the biggest changes in the war we’ve seen yet?

Obama tells us that Iraq is a failed mission and that we should give up.  But how can he say those things if he hasn’t visited the war zone?  Or even spoken directly and privately to the man in charge of the mission, General David Petraeus?

That Obama can have his mind all made up on Iraq while refusing to go and observe the facts on the ground for himself tells us a lot about the sort of leader Obama would be.  Namely, that he’d be one more interested in partisan politics than sound policy.