McCain's New Line On Obama

The Atlantic .com ^ | July 22,2008 | Marc Ambinder

[Chuzzlewit]

man, I don’t know.. I really think he needs to take the gloves off.. just my opinion.

[Polybius]

"I stood up and said I would rather lose a campaign than lose a war."

McCain is well on his way to accomplishing just that even with the "war" won by Bush and Petraeus, so I guess he has that going for him. Liberally Lame, like his campaign.

The only way that George W. Bush won the war was by finally taking McCain's advice in regards to the Surge.

Back in 2006, when BOTH George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were against the Surge and when Petraus was not even in command yet, McCain had already been championing the Surge for quite a while.

If Bush had not accepted McCain long held position on the Surge by the end of 2006, the war might be lost by now and Petraus would have been either following Rumsfeld's failed policies or would have been canned for advocating McCain's policies.

Show me a link before the 2006 elections where George W. Bush championed the Surge.

Show me a link before the 2006 elections where General Petraeus publicly advocated the Surge.

Show me a link dating back to November 2006 that documents that ANYBODY in Congress or the White House was pushing for the Surge except for John McCain, Cheney and a few low level staffers.

Here is how things REALLY were back at the end of 2006:

The president was in a weak and lonely position. After Republicans lost the Senate and House in the midterm election on November 7, nearly 200 members of Congress had met with him at the White House, mostly to grouse about Iraq. ...... Inside his own administration, Bush had few allies on a surge in Iraq aside from the vice president and a coterie of National Security Council (NSC) staffers. The Joint Chiefs were disinclined to send more troops to Iraq or adopt a new strategy. So were General George Casey, the American commander in Iraq, and Centcom commander John Abizaid. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice favored a troop pullback. A week earlier, the Iraq Study Group, better known as the Baker-Hamilton Commission, had recommended a graceful exit from Iraq. ............ In September, Rumsfeld had rejected the idea of a surge when retired general Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the Army and a member of the advisory Defense Policy Review Board, met with him and Pace. Keane insisted the "train and leave" strategy, as Bush referred to it, was failing. He proposed a counterinsurgency strategy, the addition of five to eight Army brigades, and a primary focus on taking back Baghdad. Rumsfeld was unconvinced.

Back in November of 2006, when John McCain was pushing for the Surge and when his position had the support of only 18% in public opinion polls, the Republican Congress was screaming like a stuck pig looking for political cover, Rumsfeld was rejecting the Surge and Bush was backing up Rumsfeld.

In fact, Rumsfeld had previously fired commanders such as General Shinseki for disagreeing with Rumsfeld's notion that the war could be won on the cheap because Rumsfeld said so.

In a public rebuke to Shinseki, Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, called Shinseki's estimate "far off the mark"[15] and "wildly off the mark". Wolfowitz said it would be "hard to believe" more troops would be required for post-war Iraq than to remove Saddam Hussein from power.[1] Specifically, Wolfowitz said to the House Budget Committee on February 27, 2003: .............. DEP. SEC. WOLFOWITZ: There has been a good deal of comment - some of it quite outlandish - about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark. It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army - hard to imagine. ..... On November 15, 2006, Gen. John P. Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committtee, acknowledged that in his view, and with hindsight, Shinseki had been correct in his view that a larger post-war force was needed.

As they say, "Victory has a thousand fathers" so, now that the Surge the McCain was pushing for back in 2006 is producing victory, the McCain haters forget the time when it was only McCain that was championing the Surge when George W. Bush was against it.

Back in November of 2006 and before that, McCain's Surge idea was as toxic as the Black Plague to military and political careers. Just ask General Shinseki.

[Salvation]

McCain bump. Good line.