Last week, John McCain made one of his more embarrassing recent errors, telling a Wisconsin audience that U.S. forces in Iraq “have drawn down to pre-surge levels.” That’s clearly false.
McCain and his campaign compounded the problem by insisting he was right about troop levels — reality notwithstanding — and arguing that everyone was “nitpicking” by suggesting his comments about his signature issue should be accurate. His aides eventually tried to make this a semantics debate, suggesting McCain would have been right if we disregard “verb tense.”
While McCain and his cohorts insisted that his obvious error wasn’t an error at all, the senator nevertheless changed his rhetoric yesterday. That’s the good news. The bad news is, McCain’s still wrong.
“[Gen. Petraeus] is gonna come back in July, when our drawdown from the surge,” McCain said. Three of the five brigades are already back. There’s two more brigades that will coming back at the end of July…. But we are drawing back down from the surge. And then in July, he said that he wants to pause.”
Except we’re not really “drawing back down from the surge.” Before the surge, there were 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. There are 155,000 now. In July, there will be 140,000.
This isn’t a debate over “verb tense.” At the end of the current drawdown, we’ll have more U.S. troops in Iraq than before the surge began. McCain may find that politically inconvenient, but that doesn’t make his claims any less false.
And people are beginning to notice.
One of the tangential downsides to the prolonged Democratic nominating fight is that McCain’s errors of fact and judgment were frequently overlooked. The Clinton-Obama race was sucking up all the media oxygen, and news that would have been quite embarrassing to McCain received little attention, if any.
But McCain’s confusion last week about deployment levels did not go by unnoticed.
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dick Polman:
If more people were paying attention, they might well wonder whether this guy is as sharp about foreign policy as he purports to be.
CNN’s Jack Cafferty:
How is it nitpicking if he says we have drawn down to pre-surge levels and two of the five combat brigades that were sent in there for the surge are still in there? … You know, it’s like the difference between Shia and Sunni. You know. These are things you gotta work out before you get in front of a microphone.
[T]he attempt by the McCain media machine to spin the mistake as a simple matter of “verb tenses” is an insult to our intelligence.
The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder:
Getting Iraq Right is the sine qua non of his campaign, and imprecision exposes his flank and it degrades his brand. The campaign contends that the press is frothing over a question of semantics, but that’s tough to argue. The scope of U.S. troop deployment in Iraq is the central issue of the presidential election. When combat brigades withdraw is not a detail. It is an essential element of the question.
Asked if he “misspoke” yesterday on troop levels currently being at “pre-surge levels,” McCain said, “Of course not.” He defended himself by reiterating that U.S. troops have, in fact, been “drawn down.” … But according to NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube, the U.S. has not drawn down to ‘pre-surge levels’ as McCain, in fact, said. Those troops will not be at those levels even after the five surge brigades finish redeploying later this summer.
McCain may find it harder to skate by over the next five months. Given the huge number of mistakes McCain has made about Iraq lately, he might want to take this time to get his act together.