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Ad-lib? Not when you repeat it |
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By Josh Marshall
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Posted: 04/09/08 04:45 PM [ET] |
If I didn’t know better I would think that Democrats were telling some terrible untruth by claiming that John McCain says he’d be happy to see American soldiers occupying Iraq for another hundred years. Luckily, I do know better, though, so let me take a moment to call foul on all those other press secretaries and Republican yakmeisters.
First, did he really say it? Of course he said it, and not just once. Though McCain has tried to pass off the remarks as an ad-lib with a voter at a New Hampshire town hall, he actually made the same boast several times. In fact, he got so into it that 100 years was his shortest time span. Just after the town hall in New Hampshire, McCain was so excited about his new riff that he told Mother Jones magazine’s David Corn he’d be happy to make it a thousand years or even a million. In case nobody noticed, a short while later he told “Face the Nation’s” Bob Schieffer that he was pretty sure the American people didn’t care if we were in Iraq for a thousand or 10,000 years.
In other words, back when it was politically advantageous to do so, during the Republican primary race, McCain said this over and over again. Now that he’s fighting in the general, among an electorate that overwhelmingly wants to leave Iraq in the near future, he and his campaign can see that those words are political poison. So they’re doing everything they can to make the quotes off-limits.
First we heard that it’s not right to say that he’s happy for the Iraq “war” to continue for a century because he’s insisting that he’s only OK with it if we’re talking about the fantasy Iraq, where none of our soldiers ever gets killed and where we don’t have to pay tens of billions of dollars a year to garrison the country. Even “occupation” is unacceptable, because what McCain says he’s really talking about is a “presence” on the model of Korea, Japan and Germany.
But when you skim through these explanations you can see pretty quickly why Republicans simply do not want this to be discussed at all, and for a simple reason. Iraq’s not Japan or Germany. America has been in Iraq for five years. And they don’t like it. So long as it’s in an orderly and responsible way, the overwhelming majority of them want to leave. So someone who breezily talks about garrisoning our troops in Iraq for another century is someone most any voter can easily spot as being totally out of touch with where the country is on this issue.
McCain’s defenders come back with his caveats. Americans don’t like being in Iraq because we’re seeing American soldiers and Marines dying at a rate of one or more a day and it’s costing us $100 billion a year. McCain’s only for staying there forever as long as our troops aren’t getting killed anymore. But this is simply a bizarre counterfactual that again shows how simply out of touch he is. While American casualties are down significantly from their peak in 2007, there’s little reason to think our occupation will ever become bloodless. And even if Iraq becomes Finland, it will still take mountains of American cash to sustain it.
What McCain wants is to make a total commitment to the permanent garrisoning of Iraq but also add a big fat asterisk that stipulates that the occupation that has been bloody and fiscally ruinous will suddenly cease to be so in his fantasy future. But, again, that just makes it clear how out of touch he is — for all his trips to the region — with the real situation and where the American people are.
So Democrats should keep hitting this point early and often: John McCain is happy staying in Iraq for another hundred years. Why? Because he said it. And more importantly, because he means it.
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