Uh-huh.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, made a surprising suggestion Thursday night: If he had been elected in 2000, there might not have been a war in Iraq.
Given the vigor with which John McCain regularly finds a television camera to inform us who should be bombed or who should be supplied with arms he will have to forgive us for being skeptical on that point.
“If presented with that same evidence today, I would vote the same way,” McCain said of his vote to deploy troops in the country. “I respected and trusted the Secretary of State, Colin Powell. But it’s obvious now, in retrospect, that Saddam Hussein – although he had used weapons of mass destruction – did not have the inventory that we seem to have evidence of. Which now looking back on it, with the benefit of hindsight, (the evidence) was very flimsy.”
It was flimsy with the benefit of sight-sight, too. There were plenty of voices perfectly able to point out the flimsiness of the evidence at the time, it's just that they were called pacifists and naive and unAmerican for pointing that out. Coming to this conclusion a decade later is being a bit slow on the draw, old sport.
If he had been president, McCain said, “I think I would have challenged the evidence with greater scrutiny. I think that with my background with the military and knowledge of national security with these issues that I hope that I would have been able to see through the evidence that was presented at the time.”
Horsecrap. You had the same background in the military and "knowledge" of national security when you were pushing for the war in the Senate, and you thought the evidence presented was just peachy. You were one of the 100 people in the country most able to challenge the evidence; you didn't.
This appears to be one of those things that ambitious and narcissistic people tell themselves to feel better. Oh, I'm much smarter than the last guy on the job, which was also me. Now let's send more and better arms to the rebels in Syria, who are really swell guys we can count on.
