As we all know on, Tuesday night during a CBS interview with Katie Couric, John McCain lied, or was mistaken about The Surge/Sunni-Anbar Awakening timeline in Iraq.
Unfortunately, as we found out CBS News, removed McCain's incorrect answer, kept the original question, then substituted the question, with a different answer.
Yesterday, in response (during the end of McCain's town hall meeting in Pennsylvania), he gave one of his most convoluted/confusing answers yet, on the Surge/Anbar Awakening (and I cried about it all day on Kos, lol)
Fortunately (for us), McCain repeated his bewildering explantion, in front of the Cheese Case (during a unscheduled interview), at the King Supermarket, in the Westgate Mall, in Bethleham, PA.
Remember (probably in embarrassment), he had cancelled a scheduled Press Conference yesterday.
Here's the video and link (Sometimes MSNBC's video links don't embed), courtesy of Countdown:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
<iframe height="339" width="425" src="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/25823434#25823434" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
First McCain said on CBS, The Surge Predated The Sunni Awakening. Then he says, The Surge started before Bush said it did (yesterday). Then he added that (Yesterday), that The Surge, The Anbar Awakening, The Counter Insurgency and Political awakening happened similtaneously. Say what?
But despite McCain's royal Faux Pas, USA Today, decided to write an editorial, titled: http://blogs.usatoday.com/...
Our view on Iraq: Why can't Obama admit the obvious? The surge worked
USA today, wrote their questionable editorial despite the fact in the same article they admitted that:
The surge didn't do all of that; a cease-fire by Shiite militias and the switch by Sunni insurgents from attacking Americans to fighting al-Qaeda helped enormously. But the extra U.S. troops, brilliantly deployed by Gen. David Petraeus, have made a huge difference in calming the chaos. In doing so, it also contributed to the other developments.
So why the title USA today?
But I would reccomend, to all you, to please read the very well written opinion piece, titled "McCain's Confusion", by Steve Chapman, in the Chicago Tribune. I copied the whole artile (it's that good. But if you can't read it all, just go to the highlighted portion of it, then skip to the rest/end of the diary.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/... It's so good; I'll reprint the article in full.
McCain's Confusion On Iraq
By Steve Chapman
Despite creeping toward withdrawal himself, McCain continues to lambaste Obama for setting a timetable. But if the current policy is the stunning success depicted by McCain, it should be eminently practical to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis by the middle of 2010. If it is impossible to do that, more than seven years after the occupation began, how can McCain say the existing strategy is working?
The Arizona senator sounded frustrated this week, insisting that Obama was "completely wrong" in opposing the Bush administration's escalation of the war in January 2007. "The fact is, if we had done what Sen. Obama wanted to do, we would have lost," he declared. "And we would have faced a wider war. And we would have had greater problems in Afghanistan and the entire region."
What McCain omits is that if he himself had been right all the times before 2007 that he said things were going fine, no surge would have been needed. He's like a weatherman who forecasts clear skies every day and, when the rain finally lets up after a week, expects a standing ovation for his accuracy.
If we had done what Obama wanted to do back in 2002, we would not have lost -- because we would not have invaded Iraq to start with. We would not have suffered 4,100 dead and 30,000 wounded or burned through hundreds of billions of dollars.
We also would not have diverted ourselves from the correct focus of the war on terrorism. "Greater problems in Afghanistan and the entire region"? Apparently McCain hasn't noticed that we got those in spite of the surge, or more likely because of it
schapman@tribune.com
So why does some in the media (like Brian Williams, of NBC, and USA Today), keep talking about The Surge and Obama. They keep taking about this, despite John McCain's continued "confusion" on his only "911"/Giuliani type claim type claim to fame.
For the record. The real (or first) Hero in Iraq, and the Sunni Awakening, was not General Petraeus, but Col. McFarland. As stated on The Rachel Maddow, yesterday, with National Security Network, Editor, Ilan Goldberg yesterday, "its as if General McFarland does all the work, then John McCain's swooops in and tries to claim all the credit for it".
Here are two citations, from the excellent site (and source of Iraq war information, The National Security Nework, aka NSNetwork:
McCain’s history is wrong, according to Colonel McFarland. The Commanding Officer in the Anbar province at the time, wrote an article detailing his first-hand experiences there in starting the Awakening. The timeframe he discusses is June 2006-February 2007. McFarland notes that the first surge troops were just arriving as his men were leaving Anbar. McFarland was therefore not even in Iraq when McCain places him there. [Military Review, March/April 2008]
The Anbar Awakening came before the surge. As Colin Kahl noted in Foreign Affairs, "The Awakening began in Anbar Province more than a year before the surge and took off in the summer and fall of 2006 in Ramadi and elsewhere, long before extra U.S. forces started flowing into Iraq in February and March of 2007." [Foreign Affairs, July/August 2008]
McCain is not only a liar. But he's a gutless, greedy, pathetic excuse of a wannabee war hero/expert.