The Many Faces of John McCain

John McCain has been the vulture circling above Donald Rumsfeld's head for years.

On Tuesday, he swooped down in anticipation of Rumsfeld's demise.

On Sunday as a guest on Meet the Press, McCain once again expressed his displeasure with Rumsfeld but said that he respected the President's right to select his "team."

Transcript

MR. GREGORY: Do you think Secretary Rumsfeld should keep his job?

SEN. McCAIN: That’s up to the president of the United States. The president picks his team and the president—as long as the president has confidence in him, then he’ll keep that team.

MR. GREGORY: Even at this stage of the war, you think, you still stick to that position that it’s up to the president?

SEN. McCAIN: Because elections have consequences. The president has the right to pick his team. I’ve been asked a number of times if I had confidence in Secretary Rumsfeld and the answer is no.

MR. GREGORY: But you still think he should stay in place if the president wants him.

SEN. McCAIN: I think the president should pick his team and I will support the president’s selections.

On Tuesday, McCain had a very strange way of showing support for the president's selections and their Iraq strategy. Only two days after claiming to stand shoulder to shoulder with President Bush, McCain was mercilessly bashing the Iraq war plan and mocking the administration.

It's those "inconsistencies" that make McCain appear to be a cheap media whore and, frankly, unstable.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Republican Sen. John McCain, a staunch defender of the Iraq war, on Tuesday faulted the Bush administration for misleading Americans into believing the conflict would be "some kind of day at the beach."

The potential 2008 presidential candidate, who a day earlier had rejected calls for withdrawing U.S. forces, said the administration had failed to make clear the challenges facing the military.

"I think one of the biggest mistakes we made was underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required," McCain said. "Stuff happens, mission accomplished, last throes, a few dead-enders. I'm just more familiar with those statements than anyone else because it grieves me so much that we had not told the American people how tough and difficult this task would be."

Those phrases are closely associated with top members of the Bush administration, including the president.

McCain and AP conveniently leave out the many times that top members of the Bush administration, including the President, warned that the birth of a democracy is a difficult task.

On October 16, 2003, Rumsfeld wrote, "It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog."

Is a "long, hard slog" the same as a "day at the beach"?

McCain's memory is obviously quite selective.

The Arizona senator said that talk "has contributed enormously to the frustration that Americans feel today because they were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach, which many of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking."

Americans who weren't paying attention may have been under the impression that Iraq was going to be a day at the beach, but that's their fault for not listening.

...Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was glad to hear McCain has realized "we need more than tough talk" on Iraq.

"It's time we win the war on terror," said Reid. "To do that we must change the course in Iraq."

On Monday, McCain said at an appearance in suburban Cleveland that if U.S. troops announce a specific date to leave Iraq, insurgents will bide their time until they have an opportunity to act without interference.

"The chaos that would ensue would have direct implications for our national security," McCain said.

Here's some confusion. Naturally, Reid doesn't know what's going on.

Reid thinks that McCain is getting on board with the retreat and defeat Dems.

He's not. However, he is being highly critical of the way the war has been managed.

DeWine said Congress would not have had the chance to authorize the war if the intelligence on Iraq's military capability and intentions were accurate.

"It would never have come up for a vote so it would have been an entirely different situation," he said.

One more time--

Bush cannot be blamed for the faulty intelligence.

It was the same information that the Dems adhered to under Clinton. It was the same stuff that the rest of the world believed.

In January of 2004, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

[N]obody has made a remotely persuasive case that Bush lied. The German, Russian, French, Israeli, British, Chinese and U.S. governments all agreed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The German assessment was even more dire than our own. They were convinced Saddam would have a nuclear weapon by 2005.

Bill Clinton and his entire administration believed Saddam had WMDs. In 2002 Robert Einhorn, Clinton's point man on WMDs, testified to Congress, "Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors" including our 100,000 troops in Saudi Arabia.

The threat - chemical, biological and nuclear - against U.S. territory proper was only a few years away, according to Einhorn. Dick Gephardt, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Wesley Clark, Joe Lieberman, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder: all of these people believed Iraq had major stockpiles of WMDs.

Were they all "liars" like President Bush? No? Why not?

You can't have it both ways. You can't say Bush lied while others who said the same thing were being honest. The White House was operating with fundamentally identical information to that of Clinton, Pollack and Einhorn. What was different was that this White House needed to deal with the post-9/11 world.

Have mistakes been made in Iraq? Of course.

Has there ever been a war when mistakes weren't made?

Whether it's the intelligence, or the war plan, or the plan to secure the peace that's being criticized is irrelevant.

What matters is what happens next.

If changing course means cutting and running, then that course would prove to be disastrous.

Look at what resulted when Clinton failed to adequately arm our troops in Somalia, and then decided to cut and run after the battle of Mogadishu.

From Frontline's "Hunting Bin Laden":

When the Marines landed in the last days of 1992, bin Laden sent in his own soldiers, armed with AK-47's and rocket launchers. Soon, using the techniques they had perfected against the Russians, they were shooting down American helicopters...

"After leaving Afghanistan, the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle, thinking that the Americans were like the Russians," bin Laden said. "The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat. And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda ... about being the world leader and the leader of the New World Order, and after a few blows they forgot about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat."

Defeat in Iraq is not an option. For our safety, it's not an option. Bin Laden's own words tell us that defeat is not an option.

I think McCain's Tuesday comments in Ohio reveal his effort to position himself to reject Bush's policies while at the same time refusing to align with the Dems' surrender strategy.

Although McCain is distancing himself from Bush, he's still demanding victory in Iraq. He's trashing the President but he's not accepting the liberal's retreat plan.

McCain is trying to be all things to all people, but I think he ends up being nothing to nobody.