The Genius of Our Next Leader

John McCain's been all over the map when it comes to Iraq for a long time. Cliff Schecter notes that way back in 1990, two and a half weeks after Iraq had invaded Kuwait, McCain said that Americans shouldn't support a ground war in the Middle East because "we cannot even contemplate, in my view, trading American blood for Iraqi blood." Less than two months later, though, McCain not only contemplated the possibility, he voted to go to war on behalf of Kuwait.

As the war drums sounded for the current fiasco, McCain, echoing Dick Cheney and the administration's legion of half-baked neocons, promised a cakewalk. In September of 2002, he warned us that there might be a few casualties: "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." That same month, he told CNN, "We're not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad … we're not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies." And in early 2003, he promised viewers of MCNBC, "We will win this conflict. We will win it easily."

This month, though, he told MSNBC that he knew all along 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," he said.

In October, John McCain was just as sure that 20,000 more U.S. troops would do the trick in Iraq -- bringing about stability, democracy and prosperity, and restoring America's image in the world (or something) -- as he had been about the ease with which it would be prosecuted in 2003. When reporters asked him to elaborate on his statement about the need for more combat troops in Iraq to quell a "classic insurgency," McCain said: "Another 20,000 troops in Iraq, but that means expanding the Army and the Marine Corps."

In November, McCain said again: "I believe victory is still attainable," adding: "But without additional combat forces, we will not win this war."

***

But if McCain thought that he was safe in advocating a troop buildup -- safe because Bush would never be insane enough to call for escalating an unpopular war just a couple of months after American voters delivered his party a powerful message that they had lost confidence in those running it -- he underestimated the president's capacity for stubborn self-delusion.

When it became clear that Bush was in fact going to call for an increase in troops, John Edwards, sensing an opportunity to get out ahead of the curve on McCain, who's considered a strong challenger for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, termed the escalation the "McCain Doctrine," effectively hanging the policy around the senator's neck.

And McCain's been squirming ever since. In early January, he said that the plan would require, specifically, 30,000 troops, adding, "a small size [deployment] would be the worst of all options to exercise, in my view." Just a day later, he went to the American Enterprise Institute with his friend Joe Lieberman and said: "We are not specific on numbers, we don't have -- we are talking about three or four combat brigades, in Baghdad, and one or two more in Anbar province. We are not that much detailed-oriented."

As blogger Steve Benen points out, McCain's been moving the goalposts in an attempt to preemptively distance himself from a policy that's all but guaranteed to fail.

Link.