Obama promises to sit down with dictators in Venezuela, Cuba, Syria and Iran

Barack Obama premised his campaign on calling for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. But now he's been quietly telling Iraq "not so fast." It's part of a deceptive pattern. Iraq's Foreign Minister Moshyar Zebari told the New York Post's Amir Taheri that Obama made delaying the troops' return a key theme of his talks with Iraqi leaders during his campaign stop in Baghdad last July. "He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the U.S. elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari told Teheri, on the record. Funny, that's not what Obama told voters. He has made an immediate pullout the cornerstone of his campaign. Taheri's report signals the Democratic standard-bearer would manipulate the war's end for political advantage and is willing to deceive voters to do it. This in itself is reprehensible. But his secret calls also leave U.S. troops unnecessarily in harm's way. It's the kind of foreign policy meddling that serves Obama's interests over the national interest. "Obama has given Iraqis the impression that he doesn't want Iraq to appear anything like a success, let alone a victory, for America," Taheri reported. "To be credible, his foreign-policy philosophy requires Iraq to be seen as a failure, a disaster, a quagmire, a pig with lipstick or any of the other apocalyptic adjectives used by the American defeat industry in the past five years." Can Obama be trusted? We ask because he's shown a pattern of secretive double-dealing with voters, not just in his talking about small town voters one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco, as Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin pointed out, but particularly in foreign affairs. It dates back to at least February, when Obama's economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, secretly told the Canadian embassy that Obama's demagoguery against NAFTA in the primaries was just a Styrofoam-pillar bid to win the Ohio vote. Obama's pattern of deception continued. In March, Colombian troops raided a FARC terrorist camp in Ecuador and recovered a terrorist computer belonging to a top FARC warlord, Raul Reyes. Computer e-mails revealed that someone who knew Obama's positions had secretly met with the terrorists and assured them Obama would cut U.S. military aid under Plan Colombia and veto its free trade pact. Both are major goals of the Marxist terrorists aligned with America's enemies. Subsequent events confirmed this. Obama did come out in favor of shutting Colombia out of free trade. More disturbingly, Obama adviser Daniel Restrepo last week told Colombia's Radio Caracol that Obama planned to convert the military aid Colombia needs to crush terrorists into social aid programs that don't. That's not the end of it. Now Obama is double-dealing with Iraqi officials to leave American troops in harm's way and prolong the appearance of war long enough to call it a failure and win votes. The astonishing thing about Obama's deals is they're the very thing Democrats accused Republicans of without a shred of proof. They accused Richard Nixon of making a secret deal with the North Vietnamese to prolong the Vietnam war enough to presumably win election in 1968. Years later, in 1980, they accused Ronald Reagan of making a secret deal with Iranian terrorists holding U.S. diplomats hostage to win election over incumbent Jimmy Carter. Neither of these claims, often repeated by leftist historians, has ever been proven. But the statement of Iraq's foreign minister, speaking to a leading writer on foreign policy, is considerably stronger as evidence. It signals that Obama places politics over the national interest to the extent that he would work against his own public positions to gull voters into electing him. It's the absolute opposite of John McCain's courageous position supporting the surge in Iraq, even as politicos were warning him he'd lose the election for it. "I'd rather lose an election than lose a war," McCain said. With Obama's promises to sit down with dictators in Venezuela, Cuba, Syria and Iran, voters have a right to ask if he's made any deals at odds with his public condemnations of them, too. Before he starts acting like president, he needs to come clean to voters and reveal his true positions. Whatever they are, voters have a right to know.