Yesterday, Barack Obama tried on his most unconvincing costume–that of commander-in-chief–giving a national security speech at Purdue University and submitting his plan to keep America safe:

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee also released a nine-page document on “Confronting 21st Century Threats,” in which his campaign said the White House, Congress and some U.S. allies had succumbed to a mind-set of “conventional thinking [that] has failed to adapt to a world of new threats.”

If Obama is so concerned with the rigidity of old school approaches, why did he try to stifle the most radical shift in national security thinking–the Petraeus plan–in recent U.S. history? Moreover, why has he vowed to “slow our development of future combat systems”? And his immediate reaction to the arrival of 21st Century threats was as conventional as they come: understand the despair of the enemy.

Here’s more on Obama’s Patton moment:

“The danger . . . is that we are constantly fighting the last war, responding to the threats that have come to fruition, instead of staying one step ahead of the threats,” Obama said.

This very line about staying one step ahead is itself a leap backward. Mr. Unconventional cribbed it from Hillary Clinton who said it about a year ago:

We can’t be fighting the last war. We have to keep preparing to fight the new war. We have to win.

Hillary employed that meaningless trope to defend her contention that while the surge was working, it was somehow too late to try to win in Iraq. Since Obama has now caught up to Hillary Clinton’s year-old Iraq stance, who knows? Maybe a year from now he’ll be touting John McCain’s current plan.

For clarity’s sake: If Obama is going to float this “last war” nonsense, then the first place we should be leaving is Afghanistan because that’s been the last war longer than Iraq has. Moreover, if he’s so keen on preparing for the next war he might want to come up with a few ideas about how to deal with an armed and dangerous Iran. But, of course, the only “last war” that Democrats want to abandon is also the only one we’re winning–in Iraq.

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