As of now, the lead item on Mark Halperin’s “The Page” is a piece noting that John McCain thinks Barack Obama “has been completely wrong” about the Middle East.
The presumptive GOP nominee slams his opponent who is traveling in the Middle East, calls him “someone who has no military experience whatsoever” during a joint presser with Bush 41.
McCain: “When you win wars, troops come home. He’s been completely wrong on the issue…. I have been steadfast in my position.”
Now, there’s quite a bit of interesting political news today, and for the life of me, I can’t imagine why Halperin thinks this deserves top billing. In fact, if you look at “The Page,” two of the top three political stories of the afternoon — and three of the top five — are McCain lashing out wildly with misleading attacks against Obama (not that Halperin actually points out that the attacks are misleading).
And as part of this excessively aggressive approach, Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s top foreign policy aide, also told reporters, “Obama’s judgment in Iraq has been universally wrong.” Appearing on NBC’s “Today” show, McCain made the exact same argument, over and over again, in some instances in response to unrelated questions.
Now, I suspect this is part of a rather desperate media strategy. Obama’s overseas, and is getting quite a bit of positive press, so the McCain campaign assumes, perhaps correctly, that the only effective way to undermine the success of Obama’s trip is to lash out, ferociously and recklessly.
That may actually work. Either way, we’ve quickly reached the point at which every McCain sentence includes a noun, a verb, and “Obama was wrong about the surge.”
Seriously, go ahead and watch this clip from the “Today” show, and count how many times McCain makes the case that he was right about the surge and that Obama was wrong.
It’s become the latest in a series of rationales for why we’re supposed to elect him. Josh Marshall asks a good question: “[I]s that enough?”
McCain implicitly concedes that he was wrong on getting into the war itself (concedes in as much as public opinion is firmly on the side of his being wrong and he realizes that). He’s also now all but forced to concede to Obama’s stand on the timing of withdrawal, in as much as the Iraqis are now being clear that they want US troops out in roughly the same period of time.
So he goes to the public with Obama being right and him wrong on starting the war in the first place and with the timing and approach to getting out — but along the way he was right about the surge, so he should be president?
Maybe the hypothetical Barack says to the hypothetical McCain, “Fine, I’ll take the hit on the surge. And you cop to being wrong about getting us into this mess in the first place and supporting it for years. And we’ll call it even.”
I find McCain’s claim to being ‘right about the surge’ dubious but arguable. But even if you concede that, it leaves McCain talking about the past and conceding the real issue that is before the public.
Agreed. Scheunemann told reporters, “Obama’s judgment in Iraq has been universally wrong.” This is almost comical, given McCain’s record on Iraq. I’m reminded of this recent Rosa Brooks column, in which she argued that McCain’s record of “getting it embarrassingly wrong on Iraq is virtually unparalleled.”
Here’s McCain, in his own words, getting Iraq wrong from Day One:
“Saddam Hussein [is] developing weapons of mass destruction as quickly as he can,” he informed Fox News in November 2001. By February 2003, McCain had upgraded Hussein’s capabilities and was warning Americans that “Hussein has the ability to … [turn] Iraq into a weapons assembly line for Al Qaeda’s network.”
Well, no. But never mind that. We won’t hold McCain responsible for the Bush administration’s cooking of the intelligence books.
So how’d McCain do on his other Iraq-related predictions?
On the Cheney/Rumsfeld Delusional Thinking Index, McCain scores a perfect 10 out of 10. “I believe that the success will be fairly easy,” he assured CNN’s Larry King in September 2002.
Quagmire? Insurgency? Naah. “We’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting,” he scoffed to Wolf Blitzer in 2002. “We’re not going to have a bloodletting.” In fact, by March 2003, McCain was positively giddy with Rumsfeldian enthusiasm: “There’s no doubt in my mind … we will be welcomed as liberators.”
When it came to predicting the sectarian conflicts that have wracked Iraq since we “liberated” it, McCain was equally off target. “There’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias,” he explained confidently on MSNBC in April 2003, “so I think they can probably get along.”
McCain’s had five long years since then to reflect on just how well Sunni and Shiite groups are getting along, but he’s still having a tough time keeping the whole thing straight. In Jordan this past March, he pronounced it “common knowledge … that Al Qaeda” — a Sunni-dominated group — “is going back into Iran” — a country led by hard-line Shiites — “and receiving training … from Iran.” Oops … no! Joe Lieberman, McCain’s new Mini-Me, whispered a correction in his ear, presumably explaining that the Iranian Shiites hate Sunni-dominated Al Qaeda and wouldn’t help the group if their lives depended on it.
A slip of the tongue on McCain’s part? That would be easier to buy if McCain hadn’t repeated variants of the claim on multiple occasions, insisting to a Texas audience in February that Iran was aiding Al Qaeda and wondering during Senate hearings if Al Qaeda in Iraq was “an obscure sect of the Shiites overall? … Or Sunnis or anybody else.”
Does McCain really want to get into a discussion about who’s been “completely wrong”? Seriously?
Because at this point, McCain’s message seems to be, “I was wrong in 2002 and 2003. And still wrong in 2004, 2005, and 2006. But I supported the surge and said it would reduce violence and lead to political reconciliation, and only some of that turned out to be wrong. So vote for me because of my accurate track record.”
Just how foolish would one have to be find this even remotely persuasive? Or put another way, just how stupid does McCain think we are?