McCain Right or Wrong on Iraq

Steve Chapman, of my hometown paper the Chicago Tribune, hypothesizes that not only is McCain wrong but he has been consistently and from the beginning. Champman is not your typical Iraq War critic because he is generally a conservative to moderate thinker. That said, he takes a very standard and typical anti Iraq War position full of logic that I firmly believe is void of reality. First, he hits McCain with criticism I hadn't yet heard...

McCain portrays himself as uniquely clear-eyed about the war. In fact, those eyes have often been full of stars. When Army Gen. Eric Shinseki forecast that more troops would be needed for the occupation, McCain didn't fret. Shortly before the invasion, he said, "I have no qualms about our strategic plans." As the online magazine Salon reports, he predicted the war would be "another chapter in the glorious history of the United States of America."

He brags now that he criticized Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the occupation. But McCain didn't declare "no confidence" in him until a year and a half after the invasion. And let's not forget the day he took a stroll through a Baghdad market, guarded by attack helicopters and 100 soldiers in full combat mode, to prove how safe Iraq was. The following day, 21 Iraqis were abducted from the market and murdered.

I am not going to go back to see exactly when McCain started criticizing the Rumsfeld strategy, however he was absolutely criticizing it and calling for more troops long before that was chich, fashionable, and something everyone recognized. I doubt he was the first, however he saw it long before most of the rest of the world did.

Chapman also criticizes McCain's photo op in a market. What Chapman doesn't reveal is that McCain could likely walk through that same market alone, with no escort, and no special protection TODAY and feel totally safe.

Then, Chapman takes the standard anti Iraq War criticism...

McCain's attempts to show off his expertise often turn into banana peels. Recently he attacked Barack Obama for saying that in the future, he might send forces back in "if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq." Jeered the Arizona senator, "Al-Qaida already has a base in Iraq. It's called al-Qaida in Iraq."
But al-Qaida in Iraq has about as much to do with al-Qaida in Afghanistan as the San Diego Padres have to do with the Catholic Church. It's a separate, independent and largely homegrown group that is focused on slaughtering Iraqi Shiites, not targeting American cities. And here's a newsflash for McCain: It didn't exist until our invasion created conditions favorable to violent insurgency.

This is just utter nonsense. The creator of AQI is Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and he went from the battlefield of Afghanistan where he fought next to UBL over to Saudi Arabia, killed Lawrence Foley, and then moved onto Iraq. He pledged his allegiance to UBL a few years later, and currently our intelligence has learned that many day to day decisions in Iraq are actually centered from Pakistan and Afghanistan. The idea that AQI and regular Al Qaeda are two separate entities who only share ideology, is not only demagoguery but frankly a flat out lie.

Chapman continues with another standard issue anti Iraq War arguement...

More than a year later, security is better. But nothing else is. The Baghdad government has failed to do the things Bush called for, and there is no sign that our troops will be coming home anytime soon, if ever.
Provincial elections, which were supposed to be held last year, remain somewhere over the rainbow. A landmark de-Baathification law turned out to be a scam, with the purported beneficiaries complaining it was even worse than the old policy. Bush said the Iraqi government would assume responsibility for security across the entire country by November 2007. We're still waiting.
The point of the surge was to catalyze rapid progress that would facilitate our departure. But now the Pentagon says that come July, we'll still have more troops than the 132,000 we had before. When Lt. Gen. Carter Ham was asked if the number will fall below 132,000 by the time Bush leaves office, he replied, "It would be premature to say that."

This is totally absurd on its face. The only way to achieve the kind of security progress we have is to either create a police state or to have significant political reconciliation. Since Iraq is NOT a police state, there has been political reconciliation. Chapman once again equates the benchmarks with political reconciliation. Even this arguement is false, but it is fallacious to boot. The reason that we have such a quelling of violence is because we flipped the Sheiks. It started in Anbar and it spread to most other provinces and now AQI has no place for sanctuary. By flipping the Sheiks most Iraqi went from supporting the enemy to supporting our side. Furthermore, there was significant increases in recruitment for police and military. This is all at the behest of the Sheiks that we flipped. That is political reconciliation, and it has lead to a transformation of Iraqi society on a local and regional level.

Furthermore, the tired arguement that the benchmarks haven't been met and thus there is no reconciliation is no longer valid either. While they have been slow in coming, the central government has finally made tangible progress on the benchmarks. Provincial elections are set for this fall, debaathification has begun, and they are sharing oil revenue. In fact, the Iraq central government has now accomplished nine of the eighteen benchmarks.

Chapman finishes with another tired anti Iraq War arguement...

McCain says the current "strategy is succeeding in Iraq." His apparent definition of success is that American forces will stay on in huge numbers as long as necessary to keep violence within acceptable limits. We were told we had to increase our numbers so we could leave. Turns out we had to increase our numbers so we could stay.

Five years after the Iraq invasion, we've suffered more than 30,000 dead and wounded troops, incurred trillions in costs and found that Iraqis are unwilling to overcome their most basic divisions. And no end is in sight. If you're grateful for that, thank John McCain.

The end is in sight Mr. Chapman, however it is typical of the anti war crowd to crow about how if it is difficult then we must quit. If we can't declare victory, then we must be losing. If we can't proclaim a time and date when troops can come home, that must mean they will be there forever. None of it is of course true. The progress is real, it is tangible, and it is all something that John McCain predicted long before it was fashionable to do so.