The Mercenary’s Cookbook

The hissy fit McCain’s been throwing over the DNC and MoveOn ads”, one would think those clips make him a tad bit nervous.  The ads show clips of a townhall meeting where McCain shrugged off a questioner’s assertion that Bush would keep forces in Iraq for 50 years, and said, ”maybe 100″.

Here is the transcript:

Offscreen voice: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years.
On screen graphic: Senator McCain. President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years.
McCain: Maybe a hundred. That’d be fine with me.
On screen: 100 years in Iraq.
On screen: 5 years. $500 billion. Over 4,000 dead.
Offscreen voice: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years.
McCain: Maybe 100.
Narrator: If all he offers is more of the same, is John McCain the right choice for America’s future?
On screen: Is John McCain the right choice for America’s future?
Narrator: The Democratic National Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising.
 

McCain tried to explain away his remarks this way:

John McCain defended his now infamous “100 years in Iraq” comments made at a town hall back in January, contending the Democrats are deliberately distorting his remarks. He explained today that those who say he wants to fight in Iraq for 100 years are making a “direct falsification” and apologized that campaigns “have to deteriorate in this fashion.”

On a purely rational level, this argument is strange. It is impossible for McCain to say the ad “deliberately distorted” his words, unless he’s claiming the videotape was altered (which Republicans, at least, are not shy about doing).  Especially, when McCain is deliberately distorting what the ad says – there is no mention of “war” anywhere, only McCain’s answer.

What McCain is essentially saying is, “It’s outrageous to suggest I’d be willing to fight a war in Iraq for 100 years, when I clearly said we’d stay 100 years after we won the war.”  How long will that take? As long as it takes. Even if it takes 100 years.

Yet, the whining from GOP circles has been so ear-piercing that they even Factcheck wagged their fingers at an ad because they hadn’t done enough to spin what McCain actually meant by this. To make matters worse, the McCain camp duped the media into portraying his words as a “gaffe” when he not only repeated the claim, but extended it to 1,000, 10,000, even a million years when confronted about his comments days later.

If there is any argument at all, it is that McCain’s quote, clipped short, leaves an impression that McCain wants war. If the Democrats have a point, it is that McCain clearly implies he’s willing to stay under present circumstances, unless he’s completely bonkers and thinks we’re only a short time away from zero US casualties. By Factcheck’s own standards, their post is as irresponsible a distortion as the DNC because their “correction” implies  McCain would not stay in Iraq if the violence continues, when he has gone out of his way to suggest the opposite. I don’t think there’s a journalist, regardless of whether or not they are claiming McCain’s words were taken out of context, who is under any dellussions McCain would leave Iraq — which is precisely the message implied by both those ads that McCain wants to shoot down. He wants to shoot them down, not because they distort his position, but because it states all too clearly what his position actually is — which is why the “don’t cut-and-run” crowd are those objecting the loudest.

John H. McFadden had an interesting post on the tactics of guilty-by-association yesterday, in relation to the Rev. Wright controversy. Basically, he says even arguing why Obama didn’t leave the church has an implied message: “Because he stayed in that church, he must be a closet black radical.”

 I see a similar strategy at work here. Politics argues in poetry. What is said is often just a metaphore for the real argument — the one we aren’t allowed to have.

So when can we start the countdown on McCain’s 100 year war? He won’t say, and no one will ask. The implication being that it’s taboo to mention the elephant in the living room.

McCain doesn’t want to leave. So you better not say it.

First, we needed to get rid of Iraq’s WMD. Once we made sure the country was free of those, we needed to occupy the country to liberate them. Then we had to round up all the Iraqis to interrogate them so we could keep the peace. Once we destroyed the terrorist networks, we were the only thing keeping Al Qaeda out, and we couldn’t just up and leave after that with Al Qaeda causing trouble everywhere.

Around this time, all hell had broken loose, and we were the glue holding everything together, and so many people had died we didn’t want them to die in vain.

Remember, a civil war was possible, and once that crisis had passed, we found ourselves the only thing maintaining order during Baghdad’s transition into ethnic enclaves, and we had a moral obligation to prevent an ethnic cleansing.

With so much at stake in such a vital region, it would be devastating to our national interests if we let things deteriorate. After all, we’re the only thing preventing Iran from influencing the Iraqi government, but now that they appear to be backing the Iraqi coalition, we need to give the Iraqi government the breathing room to set up a government, and give the disbanded Iraqi army time to organize, so they can take over security without the country erupting into chaos.

So the only thing we have left to do before we withdraw is to continue fighting until we win the war, so we can maintain a military presence for the next 100 years.