Joe Conason: McCain's amazing Iraq somersault

[babylonsister]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2008/05/16/mccain_iraq/

McCain's amazing Iraq somersault

The "straight talker" has trashed anyone who dared suggest a withdrawal date. Now he's floated one of his own.

By Joe Conason



May 16, 2008 | For a straight-talking maverick, John McCain certainly knows how to parse and pander. During this year's campaign he has already flipped and flopped on such major issues as taxation and immigration to pacify the Republican base -- but now he has executed a stunning reversal of position on Iraq war policy, which he has often touted as the symbol of his political steadfastness.

The man who scorched poor Mitt Romney because he once alluded to a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops promised on Wednesday to bring them home by January 2013, or less than five years from now. We will have "won" by then, so why not?

The Columbus, Ohio, speech into which McCain tucked this convenient guarantee was a happy description of the utopia we will inhabit following his first term as president. Most of these assertions are hardly worth arguing over, since the candidate provided little or no explanation for how he hopes to achieve drastically reduced healthcare costs, vastly improved public education, or any of his other enticing promises.

snip//

What is most insulting about this ploy, obviously designed to insulate McCain from public discontent over the war, is that he must know how fraudulent it is. He knows that even under optimal conditions we cannot bring "most" of the troops home in less than 16 months. If he can do the arithmetic, he knows for that level of withdrawal to occur by January 2013, the victory he touts would have to be achieved within two years after he takes office. Many analysts think that the conditions he sets forth will never be achieved, period; nobody believes they will be achieved within the next 30 months.

McCain also knows that the troop levels undergirding the surge cannot be sustained much longer, let alone for another two or three or five years. This war has already inflicted grave stress on the readiness of the Army and Marines, which will take a long time and a large investment to repair.

Instead of chanting "flip-flop" like the Republicans did to John Kerry, maybe we should look on the brighter side of McCain's latest somersault, and simply accept his decision to reduce the occupation's prospective duration by 95 years. At this rate, by November he will be promising that the war will be won and the ponies will magically appear just as soon as he is inaugurated.

[WillyToad]

1. McCain is trying to take both sides of this issue...

Should be a cakewalk for Obama to keep rubbing his nose in it.