About two months ago, the NYT’s Roger Cohen argued, without a hint of satire, “Nobody’s been right all the time on Iraq, but Senator John McCain has been less wrong than most.” Given that McCain’s votes, assessments, and predictions about Iraq have been consistently wrong every step of the way for six years, it seemed like an odd argument.
But as long as we’re considering McCain’s record and experience in more detail, it’s also worth going back a little further. Matt Yglesias noted the other day, “To really put McCain’s thinking on Iraq in context, you need to recall his role in the 1990s in building up Ahmed Chalabi and other related antics. Almost all Republicans have been willing to say and do absurd things on behalf of the Iraq War since the Bush administration chose to take the party in that direction. But McCain is one of the handful of major actors in actively pushing the GOP in that direction.”
McCain’s support for Chalabi has been largely ignored in the midst of the presidential campaign, but in light of Roger Cohen’s odd praise, it’s a reminder that McCain has actually been more wrong than most. Chalabi has become a scandalous figure in Iraqi politics — Bush gave him a bundle of cash and initially intended to turn Iraq over to him after the fall of Saddam — and if McCain’s judgment is open to scrutiny, his ties to Chalabi should be considered quite an embarrassment.
A new book by Aram Roston reveals that Chalabi supported John McCain (R-AZ) for president in 2000, believing that the senator would be the most receptive to his agenda. Muckraked reports:
“One of his key backers has been John McCain, who was one of the first patrons of Chalabi’s grand-sounding International Committee for a Free Iraq when it was founded in 1991. McCain was Chalabi’s favored candidate in the 2000 election since Chalabi knew that he would be able to free up the $97 million in military aid plus millions pushed through in Congress and earmarked for Chalabi’s exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, but held up by the Clinton State Department.”
Indeed, McCain was a Chalabi backer long before President Bush took power. In 1997, he tried to pressure the Clinton administration into setting up an Iraqi government in exile.
“Less wrong than most”? Please.
Indeed, Amanda at TP presented quite an indictment, with evidence that:
* McCain pressured the Bush administration to give Chalabi additional money;
* Gen. Anthony Zinni, Bush’s former Middle East special envoy, raised doubts about McCain’s requests, so McCain rebuked him at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
* the year of the Iraq invasion, McCain “joined four other Republican senators and asked Bush to ‘personally clear the bureaucratic roadblocks within the State Department’ that blocked increased funding for the Chalabi’s group.”
* the same year, McCain praised Chalabi as a “patriot who has the best interests of his country at heart.”
Steve Chapman argued this week, “McCain has been consistent about Iraq, in the sense of being consistently wrong. If the American people get a long look at what he’s said and a clear picture of our fortunes in Iraq, he may yearn for the days when he was being pilloried for offering ‘amnesty’ to illegal immigrants.”
We should be so lucky.