President McCain Speaks on Iraq

[SHRED]

The grumpy old man speaks.

In the wake of President Obama's speech last, the neoconservative architects of the Iraq War predictably reemerged to claim credit for the national disaster they portray as success. But one of them, Bill Kristol, allowed that the address was, "on the whole, not a bad speech by the president," adding that it was "unrealistic for supporters of the war to expect the president to give the speech John McCain would have given."
For his part, McCain obliged by providing his own version of the speech - and history.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Obama's rival declared, "Whether they admit it or not, the administration's Afghanistan policy suggests they have learned some lessons from Iraq--some, but not all." Appearing later on Fox News, McCain sneered:

"What should have said: 'I opposed the surge. I was wrong. I made a mistake and George W. Bush deserves credit for doing something that was very unpopular at the time.' Instead he had to say it's well known that George Bush loves the troops."

But as the record shows, it is John McCain and not Barack Obama who needs to say "I was wrong. I made a mistake." At almost every turn in the run-up to the invasion and the ensuing American occupation, McCain's judgment was almost always wrong, often disastrously so. From his predictions of a short war, claims U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators and that the U.S. would find weapons of mass destruction to his announcements of mission accomplished, his ongoing confusion over Sunni and Shiite, friend and foe in Iraq and so much more, the would-be President John McCain gets failing marks.

Here, then, is a look back at John McCain's reign of error on Iraq:

http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/001963.htm