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McCain Says He “Knows How to Win Wars”–Record Says Otherwise |
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Barack Obama gave a thoughtful, reasonable, intelligent speech today exposing the Bush-McCain obsession with Iraq. As Obama aptly put it, Bush and McCain don’t have a strategy for succeeding in Iraq, they have a strategy for staying in Iraq. So far, that strategy has worked quite well–more than five years after US troops arrived in Iraq, about 150,000 of them are stlll there.Â
McCain argues that the surge has worked, although it has actually failed to meet the benchmarks Bush and McCain set to measure its success. In responding to Obama’s common sense, McCain offered only bluster, promising to personally hunt down Bin Laden and arrogantly declaring “I know how to win wars.”
Exactly which wars are you talking about Sen. McCain? I have nothing but respect for Sen. McCain’s service, and for all the men and women who honorably served in Vietnam, but we didn’t actually win that war. Our military won a victory in Iraq, a war launched on false pretenses, but political leaders like Bush and McCain are determined to keep them in Iraq indefinitely and have frittered away any fruits of the military victory. Afghanistan is slipping away from us. I know that the media constantly defers to McCain’s authority on all matters military, but will anyone in the press/barbecue corps have the courage to point out that McCain’s chest-thumping rhetoric about “knowing how to win wars” simply doesn’t make any sense?Â
Obama’s right: Bush and McCain have obsessed over Iraq for too long, at the expense of other, more pressing threats in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. The war in Iraq has not made us safer and it has exacted a terrible toll on our military and their families, while the rest of us are not asked to sacrifice. Most Americans have had enough of this obsession and understand that it is past time to end the war in Iraq. Obama will do that. McCain will not.
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