When I read Petraeus's comments to The Post, just days before McCain landed in Baghdad, I thought, "What an opening he has created for McCain."
For some outright fantasy-mongering, the following paragraph is difficult to beat:
McCain concluded with, "I will be glad to stake my campaign on the fact that this has succeeded and the American people appreciate it."
Since an overwhelming majority of the American people want us out of Iraq, and believe we were lured there through lies, and that it has been a huge strategic blunder, McCain's position is so far out of step with the American people as to be almost directly opposite the way things really are.
Now, Broder's knee-pad clad column in honor of the very senior Senator from Arizona fails to mention a few salient comments that have been duly noted and scrutinized by Think Progress and Talking Points Memo. That Broder fails to mention them isn't surprising. It is also a sign of journalistic malpractice.
In a post dated March 18, Think Progress first noted McCain's misstatements on the relationship between al Qaeda in Iraq and Iran, and his total lack of any grasp of the distinctions between Sunni and Shi'a Islam. The post, entitled "McCain Conflates Shiite Iran And Sunni Al Qaeda, Needs To Be Corrected By Lieberman" was the first step in a series of misstatements by the presumptive Republican nominee for President. Think Progress noted a progression in misstatements as follows:
- Campaign denies McCain’s Iran/al Qaeda ‘gaffe.’
-McCain modifies his al Qaeda in Iran claim.
-Cafferty on McCain ‘gaffe’: ‘What kind of leadership is that?’
Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo has gone a step further in taking McCain's comments and highlighting them. In a post from yesterday, entitled "Unfit for Duty", Marshall uses this "gaffe" (which it really isn't; it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the realities we face in the Levant right now) as an opening to discuss McCain lack of serious foreign policy cred, which is what he gets fluffed on the most.
In almost every discussion of foreign policy, not just today but in previous years, what stands out is McCain's inability to see beyond the immediate issues of military tactics to any firm grasp of strategy or America's real vital interests. His free willingness to commit to a decades long occupation of Iraq is an example, his push for ground troops to be introduced during the Kosovo War is another. His refusal, almost inability, to grapple with the political failure of the surge is the most telling one if people will sift through its deeper implications.
The idea that fighting jihadists in Iraq or policing the country's sectarian and ethnic disputes is the calling of this century is one that is belied in virtually everything we see in flux in today's world and which seems certain to affect us through the rest of our lifetimes and our children's.
--snip--
Then you step back and see the huge number of dollars we're pouring into Iraq, the vast mountains of capital being piled up in China, the oil-fueled resurgence of Russia, the weakness of the dollar (not only in exchange rate but in its future as a reserve currency), the rising tide of anti-Americanism around the world. I don't think I've ever heard anything from John McCain that suggests he's given serious consideration to any of these issues, except as possible near term military challenges -- i.e., is China building a blue water navy to challenge the US, Russian weapons systems, etc.
Candidly, I do not think I've heard sufficient discussions or solutions to these challenges from my preferred candidates. But neither has the myopia that McCain has about Iraq. Or the willingness to spend -- how else to put it -- like a drunken sailor in that country at the expense of everything else now going on in the world.
Hillary Clinton has stipulated to McCain's qualifications as Commander-in-Chief; and Obama, implicitly, does the same. But his record actually shows he's one of the most dangerous people we could have in the Oval Office in coming years -- not just because he's a hothead in using the military, but more because he seems genuinely clueless about the real challenges and dangers the country is facing. He's too busy living in the fantasy world where our future as a great power and our very safety are all bound up in Iraq.(emphasis added)
Now, these two analyses - one labeled "salad days", the other labeled "unfit" - center on the same series of events, but each ignores part or large parts of McCain's visit to Iraq. Even with that qualification, however, I have to wonder which one is more honest.
UPDATE: This is the third time in three days that Glenn Greenwald has managed to expand and sum up a view offered here. As Glenn points out, this isn't a "brain fart" a la Joe Klein, but a fundamental misunderstanding McCain has repeated. Our choice, it seems, is simple. Do we continue to praise McCain's grasp of foreign policy nuance, or do we understand that he doesn't know what the hell he is talking about much of the time?
