While no one can know for sure what's going inside McCain's head (I doubt even he can keep track of all the panders of late), I've long suspected that McCain got screwed by Bush's escalation plan.
It goes like this --
Late last year, McCain needs to find a way to appeal to the neocon cabal. He knows the war in Iraq is finished and lost, but he cannot admit as much and hope to get out of the primaries.
He sees the Iraq Study Group close to advocating a gradual withdrawal, and conventional wisdom was convinced (despite all evidence to the contrary) that Bush would take that advice. Who can forget this mid-December Time cover? (I wonder if Michael Duffy ever wrote a follow-up piece explaining why he was so spectacularly wrong?)
So McCain hatches his too-clever-by-half plan -- while Bush works to draw down forces, he'll argue for a "surge". And when people wondered in the coming years why we lost the war -- a war that McCain had cheered from the beginning -- he would say, "if they had only listened to me, we would've won!"
So in October 2006, McCain said:
"Roughly, you need another 20,000 troops in Iraq," Mr. McCain said Friday during a visit to northern New Hampshire. "That means expanding the Army and Marine Corps by as much as 100,000 people. … It's just not a set number."
Then in January, he stuck to his guns:
McCain outlined what he viewed as the minimum levels necessary to make a surge work: three to five additional brigades in Baghdad and one brigade in Anbar Province in western Iraq, a Sunni insurgent stronghold.
That would amount to between 18,000 and 27,000 soldiers, because an Army brigade consists of about 4,500 soldiers.
Unfortunately for McCain, Bush called his bluff, suddenly embracing the escalation of the war in Iraq.
McCain is smart enough to know that the "surge" ain't going anywhere. The war is lost, and adding 20,000 troops won't help us secure Sadr City, much less the rest of Iraq.
Problem is, this was McCain's effort to bamboozle people into thinking he could've saved Iraq. And now, he's destined to be associated with the failure of the GOP's last-ditch effort to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
So how does McCain respond? By moving the goalposts.
Mr. McCain embarked on a high-profile television tour announcing his support for Mr. Bush’s move. In an interview, he said he would have preferred that the White House send in even more troops, and noted that he had pressed this position on the White House, unsuccessfully until now, for more than two years.
What a liar! As quoted above, Bush did exactly as McCain has been suggesting the past year.
But McCain has no choice. He is now tied to the Iraq War more than he ever thought would happen. McCain put his trust that Bush would follow the sane, reasonable path handed to him by the ISG. Instead, Bush embraced McCain's bullshit plan.
And that's how the Iraq War became the Bush/McCain War, and how the escalation became the "McCain Doctrine".
And no matter how we look at this, there's no way that this is what McCain had in mind.
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