John McCain's Truthiness: When You Get It Wrong On Iraq, Just Pretend You Got It Right

As far as I'm concerned, John McCain's great Mob-like embrace of the Bush plan to "surge" more troops into Iraq when McCain knows it will do no good and can only result in both increased deaths among Iraqi civilians and among American soldiers completely invalidates any of his former "hero" status for surviving a Vietnamese P.O.W. camp. I will no longer acknowledge McCain's former service and what he went through because he is so eager to consign others to a fate he himself should have been spared at there been more noble, honest men in Washington in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Just as some politicians were willing to go with the Vietnam war when they knew it was a trumped up tragedy that would only consume innocent lives, McCain is willing to send more U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians to their death simply for the purpose of trying to get elected as president in 2008, a measure even Bob Novak says is backfiring badly.

So imagine my great ...uh... surprise when I see McCain revising his own history with Iraq. The same man who said "bringing freedom and democracy" to Iraq would be a "piece of cake" now claims he always said it would be a long, arduous, and most dangerous war. From Nico at Think Progress:

Today on MSNBC, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claimed that he knew the Iraq war was “probably going to be long and hard and tough,” and that he was “sorry” for those who voted for the war believing it would be “some kind of an easy task.” “Maybe they didn’t know what they were voting for,” McCain said.

In fact, during the run-up to war in 2002 and 2003, McCain repeatedly described the prospects of war in the rosiest terms, declaring the U.S. would “win easily”:

“Because I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women.” [CNN, 9/24/02]

“We’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. We may have to take out buildings, but we’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.” [CNN, 9/29/02]

“But the point is that, one, we will win this conflict. We will win it easily.” [MSNBC, 1/22/03]