McCain on Iraq

McCain predicts Iraq war over by 2013

COLUMBUS, Ohio (CNN) -- Sen. John McCain envisions that by 2013, the Iraq war will be won, but the threat from the Taliban in Afghanistan won't be eliminated, even though Osama bin Laden will have been captured or killed.


Sen. John McCain envisions his first-term achievements during a speech in Columbus, Ohio, Thursday.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee made both statements in a speech in which he envisions the state of affairs at the end of his first term if he is elected president.

"What I want to do today is take a little time to describe what I would hope to have achieved at the end of my first term as president. I cannot guarantee I will have achieved these things," McCain said in Columbus, Ohio.

McCain's speech was unusual -- and somewhat risky -- in that it laid out benchmarks on which he could be judged.

"It certainly was an ambitious speech," said Bill Schneider, a CNN senior political analyst, noting that many of the things McCain mentioned will be "very tough things for a president to accomplish."

"But perhaps the key point that he made was the tone and tenor of his presidency when he said near the end of his speech, 'If I'm elected president, the era of the permanent campaign will end. The era of problem solving will begin,' " Schneider said.

"What's interesting about that is that precisely echoes what Barack Obama is talking about in his campaign," Schneider said, referring to the Democratic presidential candidate.

The Arizona senator said he believes that the United States will have a smaller military presence in Iraq that will not play a direct combat role, and he predicts that al Qaeda in Iraq will be defeated. Watch McCain say most troops will be home from Iraq by 2013 »

"By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and -women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom.

"The Iraq war has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension," McCain said.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/15/mccain.2013/index.html


This speech given by John McCain subtlely addresses one of the fundamental methods that the Republican party (and the Democrats in other wars) has used to shore up public support for the war. John McCain says that "By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and -women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom." Whenever "Freedom" or "Liberty" are used in defense of some action taken by the American government or military, it seems that questioning this assumption would give one the label of being "unpatriotic."

What kind of message have Bush and the war hawks of the Republican Party been projecting if they are saying that the public's not supporting a war or believing that our foreign policy has been misguided is unpatriotic? Also, what freedoms have we secured by being involved in Iraq? If anything, we have completely alienated an Iraqi population that may have once been sympathetic to our cause. However, after the Battle of Fallujah and other battles, we have only weeded out suspected terrorists by suppressing the freedom and liberty of all the Iraqi people. We have now projected a crusading image around the rest of the world and given other countries reasons to fear us if they choose not to agree with our actions.

What liberties and freedoms have been secured for the American public as a direct result of American intervention in Iraq? If there are any, they certainly can't be tangibly measured. Simply saying that there hasn't been another terrorist attack on American soil since 2001 isn't particularly good evidence that our strategy in combating terrorism is working. After all, it was just about 8 full years in between the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the second one on September 11th, 2001.

The "defending our freedoms" argument has always been used in wars throughout American history, but take the Vietnam War as a particular example. We lost the Vietnam War. It was bad, ugly, and everything worse than that. Since we lost, you would think that we must have lost many of our freedoms and libertieis, right? Not really. What freedom did I myself lose as a result of losing the Vietnam War? The government likes to say that we are protecting our freedoms when we engage in international wars, but we can now see that even when we lose, we didn't really lose any freedoms after all. Even though he has somewhat tried to distance himself from the Bush administration throughout this campaign and dismisses remarks about a McCain victory leading to a "Third Bush Term" in the White House, McCain thus far has proven only to perpetuate the myth and deception that Bush himself used to manipulate American public opinion to support this most unpopular of wars.