In response to 9/11, McCain trumped up a case for war in Iraq and the administration eventually followed suit. He became so obsessed with taking us to war that he failed to do his oversight job in Congress and ignored readily-available evidence that might have prevented it. McCain's rush to the wrong war shows Americans all they need to know about his "crisis management" abilities and foreign policy judgment.
Soon after the 9/11 catastrophe, McCain announced that Iraq would be the "second phase" of the war on terror -- adding that it might even be the source of our anthrax attacks. In December 2001, he joined a few Senators in a letter to the White House saying Saddam had to be removed from power because there was "no doubt" that he intended to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and its allies. In January 2002, aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, he told sailors and airmen: "Next up, Baghdad!" He repeated these thoughts on CNN.
Then, in February 2002, McCain made a major speech at an international conference in Munich urging that we target rogue regimes and asking Europeans to join us. Iraq was at the top of his list. He said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, terrorist training grounds and a relationship with al-Qaeda. Eventually, he linked Saddam to international terrorists, the 9/11 attacks and assured us that the "Iraqi people will greet us as liberators" and "we will win easily". In short, McCain was making a case for war six months before the administration did. Over the next year, he went on to sell the war to the public and Congress and co-chair a committee on liberation of Iraq. This was our first look at how McCain would react to a crisis.
After much similar rhetoric from the administration, Congress authorized in October 2002 possible use of force in Iraq. Congress specified, however, that the President support existing UN Security Council resolutions and use "diplomatic or other peaceful means" where feasible. In accordance with UN resolutions, international inspectors returned to find out the truth about Iraq’s weapons. The UN sent in 250 experts from 60 countries. Eventually, they enjoyed full access and made nearly 1000 inspections before the U.S. invasion.
In January 2003, two months before the invasion, the Chief of nuclear inspections (Nobel Prize winner Dr. ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency) began reporting findings on his inspections to the UN Security Council. He raised doubts that a nuclear program actually existed in Iraq. Then, on March 7, 2003, he reported no findings of a nuclear program. He found that U.S. intelligence on an Iraq procurement of uranium from Niger was based on a fake document and that U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s aluminum tubes for enriching uranium was unfounded. No illegal weapons had yet been found.
At this point anyone insisting on war was doing so, not in our country’s best interest, but for their own reasons. Bush ordered the invasion anyway, forcing the UN inspectors to leave for their own safety. They left on March 17/18, 2003. President Clinton said U.N. inspectors should have been allowed to finish their job.
Former presidential candidate, Bob Graham, chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time and was one of the few to actually review the CIA intelligence submitted to Congress. He felt that (1) the intelligence was flimsy, (2) Iraq posed only a negligible threat, (3) we were being manipulated by the administration and (4) we would be diverting resources from the more important terrorist front in Afghanistan. He voted against the war.
As a key senator on the powerful Armed Services Committee, McCain had access to the UN inspection data and U.S. intelligence, along with Chairman Bob Graham’s views on it. He was in a strong position to insist on getting the facts. Instead, McCain continued to be the war’s chief proponent and even expressed impatience for the invasion. One-fourth of the Senate did not buy either McCain’s or the administration’s case for war and voted against it.
Some members of Congress have acknowledged their errors in authorizing the war, McCain has not. He continues to justify his position by saying foreign countries had gathered the same intelligence that we did -- and he would vote for the Iraq war again. Had McCain checked with either our CIA European chief of intelligence or the UN inspectors, he would have discovered that the key source for Iraq’s biological weapons arsenal was an Iraqi defector in Germany (called Curveball). The defector was known to be unstable and his information was reportedly vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm. The German supervisor of intelligence said that when he heard Colin Powell’s presentation at the UN he was:
"Aghast", "shocked" – "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven – It was not hard intelligence."
The German government opposed the Iraq invasion. Had McCain performed his congressional oversight role, it would have been evident that U.S. intelligence was faulty, that it was then being disproved by inspectors on the ground in Iraq and that his Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee had assessed the situation correctly.
When the war got out of control McCain blamed the administration’s execution, ignoring the fact that (1) he had already praised war planners Rumsfeld and Cheney and (2) it was his own precipitous response to 9/11 that led us there.
Several independent sources and Bob Woodward’s new book differ with McCain on the "surge". They maintain that other factors were primarily responsible for the reduced violence -- (1) a Sunni decision to rebel against al-Qaeda and accept monthly U.S. cash payments to secure their neighborhoods, (2) a cease fire declared by the largest Shiite militia and (3) the U.S. military fighting a smarter war by (a) employing new innovative measures to target and kill key insurgent leaders and (b) protecting the population and compensating for war damages.
Al-Qaeda now supports a McCain presidency on the grounds that he will be "impetuous" and "exhaust the United States militarily and economically" – their ultimate goal.