By IRNA
New York : Everything Mr. McCain has to say about Iraq is more troubling, and I don’t mean just his recent serial gaffe conflating Shia Iran and Sunni Qaeda, The New York Times said on Sunday.
The sum total of his public record suggests that he could well prolong the war for another century – not because he’s the crazed militarist portrayed by Democrats, but through sheer inertia, bad judgment and blundering.
For the majority of Americans who haven’t met any of the brave troops who’ve been cavalierly tossed into the quagmire, the war is out of sight and mind in a way Vietnam never was. Only 28 percent of Americans knew American casualties in Iraq were nearing 4,000 last month, according to the Pew Research Center.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that by March 2008 the percentage of prominent news stories that were about Iraq had fallen to about one- fifth of what it was in January 2007. It’s a poignant commentary on the whole war that Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the nonpartisan advocacy group, was reduced to protesting the lack of coverage.
That’s why it’s no surprise that so few stopped to absorb the disastrous six-day battle of Basra that ended last week – a mini-Tet that belied the “success” of the surge. Even fewer noticed that the presumptive Republican nominee seemed at least as oblivious to what was going down as President Bush, no tiny feat.
In Mr. Bush’s telling, Basra was a “defining moment in the history of a free Iraq.”
He praised the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and boasted repeatedly that the Iraqi forces were fighting “in the lead.” The Pentagon spokesman declared that this splendid engagement was “a byproduct of the success of the surge.” It was a defining moment all right. Mr. Maliki’s impulsive and ill-planned attempt to vanquish the militias in southern Iraq loyal to his Shia rival, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, was a failure. Though some Iraqi armed forces were briefly in the lead, others mutinied. Eventually American and British forces and air power had to ride to the rescue in both Basra and Baghdad. Even then, the result was at best a standoff, with huge casualties. The battle ended only when Mr. Maliki’s own political minions sought a cease-fire.
Mr. McCain was just as wrong about Basra as he was in 2003, when he said the war would be “brief” and be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues.
Or as he was in the 1990s, when he championed extravagant State Department funding for the war instigator Ahmad Chalabi, who’d already been branded untrustworthy by the CIA (The relationship between Chalabi and the former lobbyist Charles Black, now a chief McCain campaign strategist, is explored in a new book, “The Man Who Pushed America to War,” by Aram Roston.)
As for Basra, Mr. McCain told Joe Klein of Time in January that it was “not a problem.”
He told John King of CNN while in Baghdad last month that Mr.Sadr’s “influence has been on the wane for a long time.” When the battle ended last week, Mr. McCain said: “Apparently it was Sadr who asked for the cease-fire, declared a cease-fire. It wasn’t Maliki.
Very rarely do I see the winning side declare a cease-fire.” At least the last of those sentences was accurate. It was indeed the losing side – Maliki’s – that pleaded for the cease-fire, The New York Times said.
Perhaps all these mistaken judgments can be attributed to the fog of war. But Mr. McCain’s bigger strategic picture, immutable no matter what happens on the ground, is foggier still. Like Mr. Bush, he keeps selling Iraq as the central front in the war on Al Qaeda.