Bush, McCain & Iraq: They Still Don’t Get It

You have to hand it to George Bush and John McCain. Both are willfully deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to the Iraq war. That already has irreparably tarnished the president’s legacy and eventually may do irreparable harm to the campaign of the man who wants to succeed him.

The president, wearing his pity hat, told the British newspaper The Times that everything would be copasetic with the war and the world view of the U.S. would not be so gosh darned negative if only he “could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric,” while McCain blasély explained on NBC’s “Today” show that it’s “not too important” to determine when American troops can begin leaving Iraq.

It is hard to say which statement was more troubling, but since McCain has a fighting chance to be the next president, he gets the prize. In fact, in one fell swoop the presumptive Republican nominee again called into question his competence to be commander in chief.

“No, but that’s not too important,” McCain explained regarding troop withdrawals. “What’s important is casualties in Iraq. . . Americans are in South Korea. Americans are in Japan. American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine. American casualties, and the ability to withdraw. We will be able to withdraw. . . . But the key to it is we don’t want any more Americans in harm’s way.”

Perhaps McCain hadn’t had his morning swig of Geritol, but that statement is so wrong that it boggles the mind:

* Setting a timetable for troop withdrawals is not merely important, everything else flows from it.

But McCain merrily flips and flops, suggesting last January that a 100-year presence would be fine, then last month knocked 95 years off of that in declaring that witdrawals would commence in 2013 as his first term ended, and now, in so many words, “who cares?”

* His oft-used comparisons of Iraq with South Korea, Japan and Germany are disingenuously bogus.

McCain has tried to sell the flapdoodle that his 100-year remark was predicated on Americans not being in harms way in Iraq as is the case in those other peacable kingdoms, but that conveniently ignores a very large truth: Iraq will not stabilize until American troops leave.

* If he doesn’t want any more Americans getting killed and maimed, would it not make sense to accelerate a troop withdrawal plan?

In fact, this emperor in waiting has no clothes. McCain has a plan for staying in Iraq, but none for getting out.

Surrogates, including the ever oily Joe Lieberman, defended McCain and said that his remarks were “straight talk” and consistent with what he has been saying all along, while Democrats noted that the remarks were further evidence that McCain is talking through his backside on the war and can’t even keep his story lines straight.

Meanwhile, President Bush was busily trying to rewrite the historic record on his victory tour of Europe.

Mr. Twenty-Three Percent told The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric had created a false impression that he was “a guy really anxious for war” in Iraq. Never mind that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s explosive bestseller and other insider accounts are unanimous that Bush was so anxious to go to war that there was an elaborate propaganda campaign built on ponied-up evidence since he could never convince Americans that his ulterior motive – fulfilling the neocon wet dreasm of bringing democracy to the great unwashed of the Mideast – wouldn’t play in Peoria.