American troops will provide Barack Obama cover when he travels to Iraq and Afghanistan later this summer.

Not just cover from gunfire, either.

In winning a Democratic primary battle against the more centrist Hillary Clinton, Obama staked out some of the most liberal positions in American presidential history. Chief among them was opposition to the Iraq War, and promises to get our troops out sooner than anyone else running for president.

As Obama now runs in the general election, his troop-withdrawal stance is running up against the reality on the ground -- which is that more troops, not fewer, is what appears to have turned this war around, and that a victorious homecoming could be in the offing if one can avoid a precipitous retreat.

What will Obama say, once he sees for himself that U.S. troops have routed the enemy in Iraq? Will he acknowledge that? Will he admit that the troops have worked miracles, and that his constant drumbeat of disaster doesn't square with reality?

How far can he run from his extremist friends on the left and their previous positions that said the war was lost?

Ironically, those very troops that have turned things around may provide Obama cover as he runs toward the center. Once he sees the truth on the ground, he can, as he put it, "refine" his position on the war. He can say he's seen firsthand that the troops are, indeed, getting the job done.

That may help him appear more moderate. But will it be how he really feels?

He has been quoted as saying he hopes military men and women will see him as "a guy looking out for us and not someone trying to score cheap political points." But political points was what the primary was all about, and Democrats fell all over themselves to paint Iraq as a disaster.

Even The New York Times has taken note of Obama's dilemma, saying he must avoid the trap of being seen as "impervious to the changing reality on the ground if he sticks to his (withdrawal) plan, and as a flip-flopper if he alters it to reflect changing circumstances."

Indeed, he recently called two back-to-back news conferences to awkwardly try to explain his shifting positions on Iraq.

Concluded Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne: "When a candidate calls a second news conference to say the same thing he thought he said at the first one, you know he knows he has a problem."

Independent voters in November, Dionne says, "might vote for a hawk or a dove, but not a chameleon."

In the primary, Barack Obama made a career out of characterizing Iraq as a disaster that needs to be ameliorated as soon as he takes the oath of office.

Even with the U.S. military providing him cover, it's hard to see how he can run very far from that.