McCain on Obama on Iraq: "I hope that he will reach a position."
John McCain on Obama's recent wobbling on Iraq and Obama's concession that he would go to Iraq after McCain called him out on not visiting or meeting with our commander there:
Well, I think you know that I opposed the failed strategy of the Bush administration. I argued for the strategy that is succeeding. I have been to Iraq 8 times. I know the situation on the ground. I predicted we would succeed and we are succeeding. And, we are winning. That victory is fragile, it can be reversed. Sen. Obama opposed the surge. He said it would fail. He still is saying that it would fail. Now, last Thursday or Friday, it seemed for a while there he was agreeing with the surge, then maybe he’s not. So, I’m glad he’s going to Iraq for the second time. He hasn’t been there in 900 days. I’m glad, for the first time, he’s going to sit down with General Petraeus--for the first time, a sit-down briefing, if you can believe that. And, I hope that he will reach a position. I don’t know what position, because he’s been all over the map, calling for immediate withdrawals, back in the primaries to now saying you know--so it’s hard to know. I hope that he’ll go over there and get the kind of information he needs that he hasn’t requested in the past...But, have no doubt what my position was when I called for additional troops, it was a very unpopular thing to do and many people said my campaign was dead and I said I’d rather lose a campaign then lose a war. He said it would fail, it has succeeded. [The] American people should take notice of that. So, I’ll see what he has to say when he gets back from his visit to Iraq. And, I’m sure he’ll be impressed with a sit down with one of the greatest generals that America has ever produced, General David Petraeus.
Of course, Obama has now apparently decided that the perception that he's a flip-flopper with no principles is an even more devastating demonstration of weakness than the perception that he would sell out our allies and abandon the mission in Iraq to pander to the anti-war left - really, it's just a choice of who he surrenders to first - so his surrogates are now claiming that it's a lie that Obama ever wavered in his commitment to abandon Iraq. Oceania was never, we repeat never, at war in Iraq! But in political campaigns, as in war, the enemy gets a say in your game plan, and McCain is unlikely to let Obama simultaneously escape responsibility for being wrong about the surge and for belatedly trying to escape the consequences of being wrong.
Read On...
As for McCain's own strategy, I agree with Ross and Patrick that the Iraq issue is a winner for McCain on multiple levels despite the war's overall unpopularity, given the contrasts it presents between McCain and Obama. The narrative of McCain's role in advocating for the surge is crucial to McCain's general-election story just as it was in the primaries, and dovetails perfectly with McCain's biography and contrast with Obama.
Of course, as close observers of the situation in Iraq can tell you, the McCain narrative is somewhat oversimplified - many of the conditions that made the surge successful (e.g., Sunni cooperation, sufficient numbers of trained Iraqis with a government willing to use them) did not exist until Iraqis had been through the experience of living with the consequences of Sunni extremism and sectarian warfare in 2004-06, whereas some of the conditions for improving the situation were well underway before the surge came on line. And, of course, there are many other examples that could be cited of the gradual progress that was made in the 2004-06 period despite the setbacks. In other words, it's unfair to Bush and his civilian and military advisers to suggest that his strategy was a total failure that was singlehandedly rescued by McCain and Gen. Petraeus.
But while it would be nice indeed if the history of the 2003-07 period could be written accurately, McCain has to deal with the facts as the media and the general public believe them to be, not as they really are; he has to campaign in the real world, not conduct a history lesson dedicated to defending a Bush legacy that Bush himself could never be bothered to defend (or hire people competent to defend). Within that context, it makes all kinds of political sense to declare the Bush strategy a failure in toto and champion McCain's genuinely courageous and significant role in building political support for a doubling-down in Iraq. Even granting that the surge did not do it all by itself, it was a necessary condition for building on the opening that the "Anbar awakening" and other markers of progress had made possible, and it has proved the decisive difference in much the same way that the arrival of US troops proved the decisive difference in Europe in 1918. Thus, the McCain campaign narrative - McCain as the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance - is built around a significant and consequential truth, while Obama's narrative is based entirely on denying the facts on the ground. I know which I prefer.
