It's been well covered here and elsewhere about how McCain mistook Sunni for Shia this past week. While I tend to be sympathetic to the idea that it was merely a mistake since I more than once have said one thing while meaning another, I did notice today another statement that strikes me as indicative of either mendacity or cluelessness.
"This goes back to when we didn’t have enough boots on the ground, after the initial military success,’’ he said. "Iranian clerics moved into the region, Iranian influence moved into southern Iraq, and we basically, and the British, did not do a great deal to prevent them."
Will the media pick up on the constant mistakes McCain makes when speaking about foreign policy?
After all, this is a perfectly accurate statement, if you happen to be talking about Maliki’s coalition government which includes among others a large number of SCIRI and Al Dawa members. Both organizations had their leadership in and were based out of Iran during Saddam’s regime, owing mainly to the fact that Saddam would have happily killed them had they remained in Iraq.
Unfortunately, Senator McCain is describing the Mahdi Army group that follows Al-Sayyid Moqtada Al-Sadr, whose rise to fame and power in postwar Iraq lies not on the institutional support of the Iranian government, but rather on the fact that he was one of the few Iraqi opposition leaders to remain in the country during Saddam’s regime. While he is surely more pro-Iran than the US would like, it’s simply inaccurate and moreover dangerous to claim that he’s a pawn of Iran. Especially given that he opposes a Maliki government that welcomed President Ahmadinejad in an elaborate ceremony within the past month.
McCain’s statement cannot be explained as merely a slip of the tongue this time around. The two most obvious answers that spring to mind are that he either made a mistake, and didn’t realize the varied allegiances of Iraqi leaders, or that he is intentionally linking one of America’s more tenacious opponents in Iraq with Iran, conflating the two in the same way that the current administration was happy to conflate Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda before our invasion.
The former explanation is bad for McCain, as it hurts him right where he's strongest in the polls. It's also totally unacceptable for a presidential candidate to not know who supports whom in Iraq; if I can have a better grasp as to the alliances and divisions of Iraqi politics as a 25-year-old student with zero foreign policy experience than McCain, then he's simply derelict in his duty as a Senator, much less as a man who would be president.
The latter explanation is even worse, and allows us to make the point that McCain is what no sane American wants, a third term of George Bush. Thus far this attack hasn't gained much traction, in part because it's not easy to subvert his profile as a maverick. This profile, constructed by a fawning press corps and a few speeches back in 2000, can only be attacked by forcing McCain into mistakes, such as the one he made above, and pouncing upon them while they're still fresh.
If either of those are accurate portrayals of McCain’s statement it behooves the Fourth Estate to actually cover this issue, rather than be forced to make another embarrassing mea culpa after it’s revealed that McCain is duplicitous and/or ill-informed on vital foreign policy issues. Of course, no one in the traditional media will read this, so it really amounts to howling in the wind- and even if the high and mighty journalists at those institutions deigned to read it they wouldn’t accept being told how to accurately report the news from some anonymous diarist on a "partisan blog."
So it falls to us, then, to get out the word to friends, family, and those around us who may not visit blogs such as MyDD or Kos. Make sure to use this mistake as yet another reason why Senator McCain, for all his senority and service to the country, simply isn't qualified to be Commander in Chief. Especially not when compared to either of our fine candidates, both of whom understand the nuances of Iraq far more than McCain ever has.
