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McCain spells out his line on Iraq

James Forsyth

Tuesday, 8th April 2008

John McCain’s opening statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, at which General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker are testifying, gives us the clearest idea yet of how McCain intends to make his Iraq case in the general election. First, McCain is brutally frank about how poorly the war was conducted from the fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein to the announcement of the surge. As McCain put it today, “Four years of mismanaged wars had almost brought us to the point of no return”. He went on to describe how a full-scale civil war also seemed inevitable.

McCain then pivots to the change that the surge has wrought:

“We're no longer staring into the abyss of defeat and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success. Success, the establishment of a peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state that poses no threats to its neighbors and contributes to the defeat of terrorists, this success is within reach. And with success, Iraqi forces can take responsibility for enforcing security in their countries, and American troops can return home with the honor of having secured their country's interests at great personal costs and of helping another people achieve peace and self-determination.”

McCain follows this with a realistic but grim description of the consequences of a premature withdrawal, and a warning that, “An American failure would almost certainly require us to return to Iraq or draw us into a wider and far, far costlier war.”

It’s a well put-together and, I think, persuasive case. McCain’s criticism of the mismanagement of the first few years of the war puts clear blue water between him and President Bush — it is also why he couldn’t pick as his VP someone who served as national security advisor and secretary of state during this period — while the way he makes clear that there are costs to withdrawal shows voters that there is no easy solution to this issue, something which Obama’s glib rhetoric about withdrawal sometimes suggests. Overall, McCain appeared reasoned and presidential. The only stumble he made today was when he initially suggested al Qaeda was a Shiite group before rapidly rectifying the error.