Tracking WhiteHouse.gov's New Iraq Page

by Brian Boyer, ProPublica

The all-seeing eye of ChangeTracker,
our handy tool that watches for changes on White House Web sites, spotted a total rewrite of the Iraq agenda over the weekend. The changes reflect the new policy presented by President Obama on Friday at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Previous to the change, the agenda page was more or less a shortened version of its predecessor at the Obama campaign Web site.

Some differences we found interesting:

• Nearly one-fifth of the original version was devoted to "Preventing Humanitarian Crisis," promising "at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees and ensure Iraqis inside their own country can find sanctuary." The word "humanitarian" is absent from the new version.
• The new version flatly states: "Iraq's future is now its own responsibility."
  
• And in the new version, the administration states outright their interest in "preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon" and for "actively seeking a lasting peace between Israel and the Arab world."
  

Take a look at all the changes.

Hungry for more? You can sign up to be alerted -- via email, RSS, or Twitter -- as ChangeTracker spots changes. And if you're interested in tracking the changes to a website of your choice, you can create your own tracker: check out the tutorial for instructions.

ProPublica is America's largest investigative newsroom.

Comments

[LizM]

11:42 AM on 03/03/2009

To be fair, the Obama administra­tion's Iraq strategy is more of an evolution of the President'­s thinking, from the campaign to the presidency­.

The speech at Camp Lejeune was a welcome change to an Iraq policy that we have had to endure for the last six or more years and represents the equivalent of a 180 degree turn from how the Bush administra­tion handled this file. This speech hit all of the right notes and it is reassuring to know that the Vice President'­s fingerprin­ts are all over this new strategy.