Following up on the last item about John McCain’s speech in Denver yesterday, I was also struck by his interest in hindsight.
“Sen. Obama said this week that even knowing what he knows today that he still — still — would have opposed the surge,” said McCain.
As McCain arguments go, this one is relatively straightforward. If there was a question about the merit of the surge policy, and the conventional wisdom is that the policy “worked,” then with the benefit of hindsight, people who opposed the surge in 2007 should realize the error of their ways now.
It’s an interesting argument from someone who looks back at 2002, and thinks he was right all along.
In an interview with reporters on the back of his campaign bus, the “Straight Talk Express” Monday afternoon, McCain said that even in retrospect he would still have voted to authorize the war, as he did in 2002.
“I think there’s no question,” said the Republican’s likely presidential nominee. “I owe too much to these young people who are serving there to let political considerations interfere with what I know is right.
Now, the war has been a disaster. It’s undermined U.S. interests in any number of ways — it’s cost us dearly in blood and treasure; it’s weakened our standing in the world; it’s stretched our military to the breaking point; it’s inflamed anti-American passions throughout the Middle East; it’s made al Qaeda’s recruiting easier; etc. No rational person should look at the war and think, “Yeah, that was the decision.”
And yet, even with the benefit of hindsight, and knowing exactly how big a fiasco this war has been, McCain still thinks he made the right call.
McCain looks at Obama and says, “With hindsight, how could you not support the surge?” And the rest of us look at McCain and say, “With hindsight, how could you still support the war?”
This came up briefly in McCain’s CNN interview yesterday:
BLITZER: But he says that when it comes to judgment, back in 2002 and 2003, early 2003, before the war, he made the right call in opposing the war to begin with, and he says you blundered, you made the wrong call in supporting going to war against Saddam Hussein.
MCCAIN: I would be more than happy to go through all of that again, and historians will. The fact is that Saddam Hussein was bent on the development of weapons of mass destruction, and I’ll be glad to discuss that. The fact is, what did we do at a critical time when we were about to lose the war?
Got that? If you’re concerned about Iraq, you should pay attention to decisions made in 2007, not 2002. We should care about the past, but only the parts of the past that are convenient to John McCain. Judgment about the surge should matter to voters; judgment about the war should matter to “historians.”
It reminds me of a bit Stephen Colbert did in April, when McCain tried to explain why his experience is his strength, just so long as we don’t look to closely at McCain’s experiences.
“[W]hen you question his record he says this: ‘I want to make it very clear this is not about excisions that were made — decisions that were made in the past.’ Now, decisions that were made in the past is how people without experience define experience. So how can McCain claim to be more qualified of a candidate because of his experience yet also claim that any history of bad decisions is irrelevant? Easy. Experience. You see, he is experienced enough to know that some experience is relevant, like the fact that he has experience. While other experience, like his previous experiences, are irrelevant.”