McCain's embarrassing assertions on the Iraq surge

Even military leaders involved in last year's troop escalation agree that the prospect of U.S. withdrawal is the main reason violence has ebbed.

By Joe Conason

 

CBS screen shot of Sen. John McCain

"The surge worked."

So insistently do the media's mainstream and conservative commentators repeat the Iraq success meme -- echoing the mantra of George W. Bush and John McCain -- that to probe its premises and assumptions is not permitted. To question the success of last year's troop escalation supposedly implies a negative assessment of the performance of American soldiers and Marines and may even imperil their morale, creating a frame that stifles dissent. But now McCain himself has inadvertently reopened real debate on the subject by claiming that strategies and tactics used to quell the Sunni insurgency long before the surge troops arrived in Iraq should nevertheless be attributed to the surge. Indeed, the surge is so brilliant and so powerful, according to McCain, that it makes things happen in the past as well as in the present and the future.

That must be what passes for "maverick" thinking, although there are certainly other names for it. For those of us who remain tethered to reality, however, the success of the surge must be measured in a context that accounts for many other factors -- as must the simple assertion that we are winning the war in Iraq as a result of the escalation.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2008/07/25/mccain_and_iraq/index.html?source=rss