I Got That Ignorant Shit You Love

BlueTexan flags a certain bluff of John McCain’s:

McCain and Lieberman advocated increasing troops in Iraq, while Obama has opposed the war from the start.

”I was right. He was wrong,” McCain said. "We are winning in Iraq.”

Ever since last summer, the right has launched an effort — see, for instance, this chin-checking column from David Brooks — to divorce the surge from the war. I wrote in the Prospect last September that, politically, it was a massive success for Bush — his only real political success, arguably, since Katrina. By speaking only about the surge instead of the broader war, the administration played its only real card to hit the public-opinion reset button on Iraq. I don’t mean to overstate Bush’s success: after all, the war remains massively unpopular. But it was a savvy strategy, and it helps explain why McCain thinks he actually has an argument here.

But by saying "I was right" on Iraq, McCain’s really testing that proposition. What he’s ignoring is that ever since 2008 began, we’ve continued to see lower troop fatalities — unambigously a good thing. But the level of violence in Iraq has stopped its mid/late-2007 trajectory of decline. If you look at page 20 of the Pentagon’s latest quarterly Iraq report (sorry, it’s a PDF and I’m typing this on a Mac and WTF), you’ll see that the Weekly Security Incident trends are pretty much flatlined from November to February, with a big spike during the Second Sadrist Uprising and a recent decline from April to May. In other words, before the surge brigades returned home, we reached what seems to be a saturation point for reduced Iraqi violence, whatever you want to say was the cause of such a reduction. What happens now that the surge is over?

The answer is: still more war. Bush made yet another push today to keep us in Iraq permanently. Gen. Odierno, if he has any strategy for Iraq at all, is saying he’ll execute Petraeus’s strategy — just with about 30,000 fewer troops. That’s either cynical or irresponsible — or, at the very least, Odierno has to explain how it isn’t. In any case, we’re guaranteed that the war. Drags. On. And. On. More war in Iraq means more opportunity for al-Qaeda to use the war to its recruiting advantage; to divert U.S. resources from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border; more regional instability; and, of course, more blood and treasure.

The best that can happen for McCain, in other words, is for Iraq to be a slightly less costly strategic mistake. And if the Democratic nominee were, say, someone who voted for the war but opposed it later, on pragmatic grounds that the war was too costly, he’d have a real shot at making that argument compelling. But against someone who recognized that the war should never have been fought, he doesn’t have a motherfucking prayer. All he does is expose how desperately ignorant he actually is about U.S. national security. If I was McCain, I’d also bluster about the "success" of the surge, because you can’t ever win a war that was never in your interest in the first place — all you can do is stanch the bleeding. But now that he’s making a jump from a discrete statement about the surge to a broader judgment about the war, it’s fucking death-spiral time. Is McCain actually on Obama’s payroll?