Thu Sep 11, 2014 at 01:30 PM PDT McCain nostalgic for the good old days when Bush had Iraq won by Jed LewisonFollow for Daily Kos. After President Obamas speech about ISIL on Wednesday evening, former White House spokesman Jay Carney and current U.S. Senator John McCain got into a somewhat heated argument on CNN. Naturally, as of mid-day Thursday, it was the lead story on Politico, which described it as Carneys rough first night against McCain. I guess that makes sense given Politicos self-appointed role as Washingtons official scorekeeper of all things subjective and trivial, but given that Carney is now just a media figure and that McCain continues to be a U.S. senator, the real story is what McCain said during the exchange. The short version of McCains argument? In his words: Fact that they didnt leave a residual force in Iraq, overruling all of his military advisers, is the reason why were facing ISIS today. Not only that: We had it won, thanks to the surge. It was won. The victory was there. All we needed was a force behind to provide support, not to engage in combat, but to supply support, logistics, intelligence. Which, McCain said, was exactly what George W. Bush wanted to do. And if you dont believe him ... ... you can ask Condoleezza Rice, or George W. Bush. Carney then pointed out that Iraq didnt want U.S. troops to remain and, more importantly: I think it is a basically a whitewash of history to suggest that there was not -- were not periods of enormous chaos and fighting and bloodshed in Iraq when there were tens of thousands of troops, of American troops on the ground. That is a fact. [...] The United States of America ask our military to be a permanent occupying force in a country like Iraq. McCains response: Oh yes we can. For example: ... [after] the Korean War, we left troops behind. Bosnia, we left troops behind. Not to fight but be a stabilizing force. We have nearly 30,000 troops in South Korea today, but even if he had 30,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, it wouldnt change the fact that Iraq is not South Korea, something that McCain stubbornly refused to acknowledge. But in a way, all of that is a distraction from the most fundamental question: Whether ISIL truly is a big enough threat to America to justify his vision for tens of thousands of troops in Iraq. And his argument for why ISIL does pose such a threat was this: We had a hearing, and there was testimony from the counterterrorism people and the Department of Homeland Security. There is Twitter traffic right now and Facebook traffic, where they are urging attacks on the United States of America. And there is a great concern that our southern border and our northern border is porous and that they will be coming across. So because some militant fanatics are using Twitter and Facebook to encourage attacks against America, and because McCain believes our border is porous, we should essentially fight the Iraq War all over again? Yeesh. That makes about as much sense as ... saying that Sarah Palin is the most-qualified person in America to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. youtube/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Xm7KuYwJ5mo
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 09:07:59 +0000
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