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McCain and the Surge
McCAIN AND THE SURGE....Jon Chait finally says something that I suspect everyone knows but that nobody has bothered to point out: when John McCain tells us endlessly about his bravery in supporting the surge, he's just making stuff up. There was nothing brave about it at all:
Back in 2006, McCain was still anathema to most of the party base and elite. He needed to find issues of agreement with the administration. The surge was perfectly suited for that end. Sure, it carried some risk of hurting McCain in a general election, but McCain's issue was finding a way to get nominated. After that, he could always finesse the surge if it wasn't working, or rely on his war hero/maverick image.I'm not saying McCain took up the surge for political reasons. Surely he believed in it. But this wa a case where his beliefs dovetailed perfectly with his political interests. His persuasion of the political press corps is a triumph of spin.
I've never before bothered mentioning this myself, mainly because I guess I figured it didn't really matter much. But although the members of the Baker Commission counseled limited withdrawal from Iraq, the fact is that the surge was almost instantly popular among the Republican base and was supported by virtually every Republican politician. During the GOP primary, the major candidates practically held a competition to figure out who was really the biggest surge supporter. The political risk of supporting the surge was nil, and that would have been the case whether or not Bush had ordered it. It's just another bedtime story designed to stoke McCain's self-image of moral bravery and supposed service to a cause greater than his own political career.
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I think Chait would agree with you. He says that supporting the surge might have hure McCain in the general election, that his support for it was designed to show agreement on a policy issue with Bush, which was necessary in the campaign for the niomination. I don't quite see the problem here...
Never mind. I didn't read the post carefully enough.
When does this appear on a larger radar screen than Andrew Sullivan's blog? BTW, "emergency motion" is a link that doesn't open. Hmmmmmm?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here We Go
Todd Palin's former business partner files an emergency motion to have his divorce papers sealed. Oh God.
Look, McCain's been one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq war. Yes, he criticized the way it was being run, but so what?
The *only* politically viable thing for McCain to have done was to support the surge.
All this surging and drilling from the republicans is somewhat Freudian. Don't you think?
As I recall, the consensus in '06 was that Iraq was a total disaster, it cost the R's both houses of Congress, and the Baker commission was recommending a way for the US to get out. Lots of people thought we'd be drawing down troops.
That wouldn't have been good for McCain, being a big supporter of Bush's big mistake. It may have killed any chances he had for this campaign. He needed to distance himself from the war he supported and argued that it wasn't fought right--he would have used more troops.
McCain couldn't allow the war to end and be thought of as a failure. And if that was going to happen, he needed cover.
Well, Bush and the all the R's couldn't let the war end either.
Hence, the surge. Whether it has worked is a whole 'nother debate, but I don't recall anything particularly brave about it. It was a way to avoid admitting failure. For a time, anyway.
History will be the judge. It still ain't looking so hot for anyone who thinks Iraq is a success.
While all of this is true, I don't recall many other GOP candidates hitching their star to President* Bush on this (or many other) issues at the time. It may not have been brave to have the position, but he had to bang on about this more than his competition because of the immigration angle.
As I remember it, McCain was pretty equivocal in his support of Bush's surge at the time.
McCain had been talking about a hundred thousand extra troops (with no indication of where he was going to find that many). Pre-surge, that was a safe position to the right of the Bush administration. (If Iraq went well he could claim co-credit as a supporter, if it went badly he could pull out the "we didn't try hard enough" excuse).
When Bush came out with his own surge of 20,000 or 30,000 troops, McCain still tried to have it both ways. He supported the Bush surge but with a caveat that it was only just enough and maybe it wasn't enough. In short, McCain didn't make a courageous decision here as the media and the McCain campaign would have us think. Quite the opposite, he made the easiest possible decision.
Another story!
Why not check out Obama asking people to send money for Red Cross to him. Why did he not ask the people to send money directly to Red Cross? How much was sent to him for this purpose with the giver failing to mark on the "for" line? I think he is a snake in the grass. Now, the real question, was the amount sent to him for Red Cross included in the amount of money he raised: 8 million in one day, which was announced yesterday. Also, by it coming in through him, will he not be able to then say, I raised this amount and out of my goodness, I am giving some of my money to Charity? Would this be honest?
LMSigmon@carolina.rr.com
LaVon Sigmon, McCain also asked his donors to donate via his website and emails during Hurricane Gustav. So all your bizarro questions apply equally to him...
Another story! Why not check out Obama asking people to send money for Red Cross to him. Why did he not ask the people to send money directly to Red Cross?
I got a text message that I responded to and the amount went directly to the Red Cross and will appear on my next bill.
Also - do you really think that someone running a populist, grass roots campaign would be so stupid as to try such a move? What do you think he is? A republican?
If I remember right, McCain backed the surge when it seemed like we were going to exit Iraq. He talked about adding more troops in 2006, and got especially vocal about it at exactly the time when it looked like it would never happen. Thus McCain's thinking was probably that since no one would take his advice, he could later argue that our "defeat" in Iraq was not his fault.
Then, when Bush did the opposite of what the conventional wisdom expected, and actually did increase the troop levels in early 2007, McCain was left with no good options, so he simply backed the President's policy. As the other GOPers fell into line (as they almost always do) his position was simply as the guy who said it first, not as some kind of "Maverick." The domestic political intent of the surge, to maintain our presence through the end of Bush's term, worked, but the Iraqi goal of reaching political reconciliation did not happen. So now McCain wants to claim that he took a bold stand (only because he didn't think anyone would listen), and that it worked (it didn't).
Conservatives always think violence is the best way to solve problems. Ask Timothy McVeigh or Terry Nichols.
Something that isn't ever mentioned and that is central to the surge issue, is that the "surge" was in competition with a plan that was the result of a non-partisan blue ribbon panel of foreign policy experts. Bush basically blew it off and adopted the surge which nobody approved of except McCane.
Additionally, we need to better emphasize the fact that there have been many factors beside the surge that have led to progress in Iraq, and that many of them are in danger of being reversed due to the intransigence of the Iraqi government.
And now: No more troop drawdowns until "next year." Reduced violence yes (and the Dems ate crow on that) -- but no political reconciliation, almost a guarantee that all hell breaks loose if we don't stand between them in their civil war. Shi'ites not about to have a pro-Western government.
And pointing it out is still called leftist propaganda. Because it's also what the Democrats pointed out before the surge, and God knows we can't have those guys in charge! So: almost two years into the surge -- only 98 years to go! If the Republicans were honest, they would they be selling this as "on the brink of victory?"
Josh published a reader's email that extends yesterday's conversation about lessons one learns from adversity. POW experience may have demonstrated that McCain is a strong individual, but that doesn't make him a war hero in the sense it helped changed anything significant for the better. And even if it did, it is in poor taste to keep bringing that up at every opportunity. The more you beg people to recall your heroism, the less effective it is in speaking of your character.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/213933.php
So, if Chait is "not saying that McCain took up the surge for political reasons", then what, exactly, is Chait saying? It appears to me that Chait is trying to talk out of both sides of his keyboard.
A little history- getting more involved in Iraq was politically risky in 2006- indeed, supporting the surge and having it fail, as almost all believed would happen including me, would have meant no chance for the nomination, and no chance in the general election.
I am a bit sympathetic to the notion that McCain never believed the Bush Administration would actually implement the surge(I have actually written such a comment on Kevin's old site), but that certainly doesn't mean that McCain didn't think it the right strategy to pursue in Iraq.
McCain should be called on two things... First, his constant call for more troops was never based on a realistic assessment of how many troops were available. It was always about making him look better. Not about Reality. Second, John McCain did not win the Iraq war all by himself, and he's is campaigning as if he did. It's really unbecoming and someone really needs to point that out.
Would it be too much to ask that our candidate Obama get his facts straight on the surge? He should not be conceding to O'Reilly that it worked "beyond our wildest dreams", because it was only one of several factors, including the Sunni Awakening and the Shiite standdown, affecting the drop in violence, and maybe not the most important.