At the risk of belaboring the point, one last thought on John McCain’s decision to redefine what the “surge” policy actually means.
Up until yesterday afternoon, everyone, everywhere, knew exactly what the “surge” was. In fact, the White House communications office came up with the word in January 2007, because “troop escalation” didn’t poll well. Given public attitudes at the time, “surge” sounded better, and was easier to sell to a skeptical electorate.
The surge was straightforward: we’d send tens of thousands of additional troops, primarily to Baghdad, in order to lessen the violence and offer Iraqi leaders “breathing space” to reach political reconciliation. We now know the policy was about half-right — more troops, in combination with other factors, produced more stability, but political progress remains elusive.
Never mind all that, McCain argued yesterday, the surge isn’t what we all think it is: “A surge is really a counter-insurgency strategy, and it’s made up of a number of components. This counter-insurgency was initiated to some degree by Colonel McFarland in Anbar province, relatively on his own.”
We talked earlier about why this is complete nonsense, but my friend Anonymous Liberal raised a point I’d overlooked.
If you define “the surge” as broadly as he does here, you can no longer claim that Barack Obama opposed it. Obama, of course, has never been opposed to the use of more effective counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq. Indeed, from the moment Obama arrived in the Senate in 2004, he criticized the Bush administration for failing to appreciate that it was dealing with an insurgency and adopting appropriate counter-insurgency techniques. For example, in this 2005 speech Obama argued that we need to “focus our efforts on a more effective counter-insurgency strategy and take steam out of the insurgency.” His point at the time was that the Bush administration had failed to re-evaluate policies in Iraq that had contributed to the growth of the insurgency.
McCain and his surrogates are slamming Obama for supposedly failing to acknowledge that he was wrong about “the surge,” even going as far as to assert that Obama’s failure to do so is reminiscent of George Bush’s own inability to admit error. The truth, however, is that Obama has, on numerous occasions, acknowledged that “the surge” has contributed — along with a number of other factors — to the decreased violence in Iraq, and he’s praised the troops for their outstanding efforts. McCain on the other hand, stubbornly refuses to acknowledge when he gets basic facts wrong, instead resorting to ludicrous definitional games to try to explain why what he said was correct all along.
Yep.
The only foreign policy argument John McCain has made over the last two weeks is that he was right about the surge while Obama was wrong. And what draws him to that conclusion? Well, in January 2007, McCain supported Bush’s decision to send 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, and Obama didn’t. Since this troop escalation was partially responsible for a reduction in violence, McCain is patting himself on the back. The policy didn’t fail.
But yesterday, McCain redefined the policy, and changed the equation. If we should consider the “surge” the broader policy of a “counterinsurgency,” then Obama wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, Obama doesn’t even disagree with McCain about the merits of the surge. Everyone supported the notion of a counterinsurgency — we’ve been engaged in a counterinsurgency for years.
In other words, McCain’s Wednesday argument necessarily undoes his Tuesday argument.
[O]f course maybe McCain will say that he has a private language in which “surge” means “counterinsurgency” and it’s therefore wrong to bother him about this. In which case, I suppose it’s hard for anyone to ever prove that he’s wrong. But on the other hand if that’s what he means, then it’s hard to make sense of the claim that McCain was “right about the surge” whereas Obama was “wrong” since if “the surge” is just a generic term for the use of counterinsurgency tactics the I don’t think McCain and Obama ever really disagreed.
Isn’t word parsing fun?