Somebody in the McCain campaign noticed that the whole 100 years thing isn't playing very well. The new plan is four and a half years. The catch is that the withdrawal of US troops in contingent on "victory", and, as Ilan Goldenberg points out, McCain hasn't had such a great predictive track record thus far:
But saying it does not make it so. This is the same man who said that we would be "welcomed as liberators." The same man who said the war would be "fairly easy." The same man who said "There's not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias." The same man who one year before Iraq was hitting it's worst level of violence of the war said: "a year from now, we will have made a fair amount of progress if we stay the course."
But then McCain is known as a "straight talkin' maverick", not as an "accurate prognosticator".
--Robert Farley
