Crap, I know I put my integrity in one of these pockets.
To paraphrase a certain presidential candidate, looks like McCain would rather lie to the American people in order to avoid political embarrassment than admit a mistake and offer a truthful account of the past few years in Iraq. After mixing up the beginning of the surge (2007) with the beginning of the Anbar Awakening (2006), McCain is responding to critics by...digging deeper and redefining words. "A surge is really a counterinsurgency made up of a number of components," explained McCain. "I'm not sure people understand that `surge' is part of a counterinsurgency." No, "the surge" refers to a particular military strategy implemented in Iraq in Spring 2007 which involved a surge" of 30,000 additional troops for a limited period of time in order to restore stability and create the space for political reconciliation. John McCain has not, in the past, been unclear on this point. His attempts at redefinition, however, are a sad mix of confused and prideful. Joe Klein elaborates:MacFarland, as McCain well knows, had been working on turning the Sunni tribes for months, well before the Surge was even a glimmer in George Bush's eye. The Anbar Awakening initiative began in October of 2006 (and MacFarland had been working for months before that to convince the Sunnis to switch sides). At the time, General George Casey--whom McCain has rightly skewered--was in charge of MNF-I and he was no fan of counterinsurgency (coin) tactics. If you really want to be technically correct--and who doesn't?--Petraeus didn't really begin the implementation of coin tactics in Baghdad until the Joint Security Stations were established in late Spring of 2007. (Remember how people like McCain were saying during the very bloody months of May and June of 2007, "The surge has only just begun." He was absolutely right about that.)But he's wrong now, and trying to b.s. his way through a gaffe. Simple way out: "I misspoke yesterday. The Anbar Awakening was well underway when the surge began." Pride, though, seems to have the upper hand right now--pride that goeth before, during and after the fall of McCain's Middle East policies.This flare-up over a few small sentences may seem like a small event in the context of a full presidential campaign, but it actually strikes at the heart of McCain's two arguments for the presidency. The first is his claim to a superior honesty than that offered by his opponents. "Straight talk" has long ago faded into a campy catchphrase, but it once stood for something meaningful: A leader who wouldn't lie or prevaricate or fudge. Who would trade the short-term advantages of being able to always claim he was actually right for the long-term benefits of a deeper, more trusting relationship with the electorate.The second is his claim to superior judgment, and understanding, of Iraq. If Iraq were a simple issue, it would hardly need to be central to the political campaign. If it were as easy as saying "more troops" or "less trops" we'd hardly need to debate about it. But though, at the end of the day, troop numbers are a broad question, the more salient issue is whether the candidates fundamentally understand what's going on in the country. McCain appears desperate to create a clean, unified theory of Iraq improvements: The Surge. It's politically useful, but clearly reductive, and in the form he offered it, factually wrong. If his instinct, however, is to reduce Iraq to simple, monocausal explanations, that's extremely dangerous, and suggests he's the last man to entrust with a task of this delicacy. Image used under a Creative Commons license from Victory NH.
