11:48 am
McCain’s Hotel California Doctrine Unravels
Here’s the problem with my not watching enough tee vee. Turns out McCain went on the CBS Early Show and talked to Harry Smith about the Maliki-Obama lovefest:
“One of the other things that (Obama) has said is that maybe the troops should be out within the next 18 months, an idea that Prime Minister al-Maliki basically agrees with,” Smith reminded McCain. “Maybe the surge, in fact, did work. Is it time for American troops to start coming home?”
“Well, Prime Minister Maliki agreed with President Bush that it would be conditions-based,” replied McCain, campaigning in Portland, Me. “If Sen. Obama had had his way, they’ve have been out last March, and we’d have never had the surge and we would have failed and we would have then faced enormous consequences of defeat, both there, and it would have–in Iraq and it would have affected Afghanistan.
“If we’d have chosen to lose in Iraq, we would have had a very serious problem, more serious problem in Afghanistan as well. So as Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said yesterday, it would be very dangerous to do what Sen. Obama wants to do, and he still fails to acknowledge that the surge succeeded… He said it would fail, and voted against it and railed against it….”
This is the best he could come up with? His basic argument is that because Obama was wrong six months ago, he’s wrong now. Therefore we shouldn’t withdraw. That line of reasoning doesn’t just fly in the face of reality; it beats reality into a pulp.
For McCain, Obama being (allegedly) wrong in the past is more important than Obama being right in the present. Even if Maliki, the guy McCain been praising for months, stabs him in the back now agrees with Obama. Even if McCain has said repeatedly that we’d leave when they asked us to leave. Even if President Bush, the guy whose Iraq policy McCain has been criticizing for years, has announced that the U.S. and Iraq have set a timetable “time horizon” for the departure of American troops.
If your last line of defense is to say you’re right because your opponent used to be (allegedly) wrong, the game is pretty much up, isn’t it? And that language about choosing to lose in Iraq — that smacks of complete desperation.
Pattrick Appel, sitting in for Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic, also points out just how circular all of this has gotten:
Let me see if I have this straight: Bush agrees with Maliki. McCain agrees with Bush and Makiki [sic]. Mailiki agrees with Obama. But McCain and Obama say they don’t agree. The election suddenly feels like a math-class word problem.
In the end, John McCain sounds more and more like the hotel clerk in the Eagles’ Hotel California: We can withdraw from Iraq any time we like, but we can never leave.
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