In a speech in the heart of Ohio, a major battleground state in the fall election, Mr. McCain set forth a sweeping, extraordinarily positive vision of what the world will look like 2013, when he says he will have been in the White House for four years.
“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,’’ Mr. McCain said at the Columbus Convention Center. “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. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced.’’
McCain isn’t even President yet and he is dumping it off on another administration in 2013. That is all kinds of awesome.
These people will say anything.
Paul in KY
IMO, this is just like Nixon’s ‘secret plan’ to end Vietnam war that he put out back in 68. All a bunch of lies for the easily deluded.
4tehlulz
He leaves out the minor detail that the US likely will be leaving a much-smaller Iraq…..
Christ how could he possibly think this is a good idea?
rawshark
They won’t say ‘anything’, they say certain buzzwords that some people want to hear.
Cyrus
Either that or he’s promising to do it at the start of his second term.
I can see the blitherers now. “Wow, what a straight-talking maverick! Obama is just saying he plans to start withdrawing in 2009, but McCain is saying he’ll definitely be out after his election!”
The Other Steve
six weeks, in and out.
that’s all it’ll take.
Scotty
It will be interesting to see what the talking heads and pundits will make of this. Will it be McCain as a visionary leader, or McCain as a crazy old coot ranting off about what goes on in his ancient mind.
Buck
In his heart he is hoping that the Mayans are right.
Rick Taylor
Gosh. If only George Bush had thought to do this back before his second term started in 2004, we’d be nearly out by now.
The Commander Guy
So McCain now has a timetable.
When Romney suggested something like this McCain was not so kind.
Matter of Fact John accused Mittens of waiving the white flag of surrender and he demanded that Mittens appologize to the troops.
jnfr
McCain’s going to wave his magic wand and make everything better!
gypsy howell
Why do you suppose he even wants to BE president?
I know it’s turned into an incredibly lucrative job (cf. Cheney & Halliburton) but it’s not like he isn’t already sitting on $100+ million, just for doing nothing but staying married to “the c***.”
He strikes me as another Bush – someone who wants the trappings of power, but really couldn’t be bothered with the hard work of actually governing.
Tax Analyst
Priceless, Rick.
Tsulagi
Well, actually McCain might be thinking you should dump it off on his second term as gratitude for his most awesome first stint as Commander Guy. You know, after his secret four year plan to re-win the war in Iraq has led to more undeniable certain success. There are more byproducts of success just straining to drop.
And like really smart R Conrad Burns said a few years ago, you don’t divulge your secret plan to anyone because that would compromise its success. Like Conrad said, everyone knows that.
Kirk
Folks, he didn’t say we’d be out. He said the war would be over. Parse the language, kids, it matters.
SamFromUtah
it’s not like he isn’t already sitting on $100+ million…
That’s the difference between people like us and people like McSame and his ilk – they have absolutely no concept of “enough”, except that it applies only to other people.
maxbaer (not the original)
So, some of the same servicemen and women who are there now will still be there?
Dennis - SGMM
Running for president in 1968, Nixon stated that “new leadership will end the war in Vietnam.” He never did actually say that he had a secret plan though. When pressed for details on how he would end the war Nixon refused to give them, stating that he didn’t want to tip his hand while negotiations were going on in Paris. Nixon later admitted that he had no plan to end the war, secret or otherwise.
Genine
LOL I was just thinking about the Mayan Calendar and the date. I was speaking with someone about it in another thread a while ago.
There is a movie about 2012. But there is a sequel to it about 2013- what happens after the transition. I haven’t watched either movie. (2012 is SOOOOOOO boring, I can’t even get through 20 minutes of it!)
McCain’s just hoping to get through, that’s all. lol
Janet Strange
Hmmmmm, sounds a whole lot like a secret plan to end the war. Where have I heard that before? Lemme see, how did it work out the last time?
protected static
Spammer sighting: ‘Jamie Holts’ rears his spammy head @ 12:37 PM.
Janet Strange
Beat me to it Dennis – but yeah, that’s the point. Nixon didn’t exactly say he had one, and he didn’t. But he was more than happy to drop vague hints and let everyone take up the cry, “He has a secret plan to end the war!”
Zifnab
Ponys!
I can haz them?
Rick Taylor
It worked great. As I recall, Nixon won. I hope we’re smarter this time.
kid bitzer
why is this loser defeatocrat setting a timetable for retreat?
why is he telling the enemy our plans in advance?
what a terrorist-loving french surrender monkey!
he must be, french! and, a democrat! i mean, defeatocrat! and,
oh. never mind.
UnkyT
So Iraq will resemble his colon?
Keith
It sounds a hell of a lot like Al Gore’s SNL State of the Union, except the audience wasn’t (audibly) laughing.
kid bitzer
and did i mention:
now they know they can just wait us out!
we’ve set a timetable for defeat!
why can’t he show any resolve?
dammit–this just shows why no one should be eligible for commander in chief who wasn’t in the military.
this loser clearly does not have the extensive combat experience of a george bush or a dick cheney.
Jake
Yeah and in 2013, monkeys will fly out of my butt.
All snark aside, isn’t McCain painting himself into a corner with this? I mean, the obvious question is hinted in John’s post: what does he imagine will happen between now and 2013 to allow for this?
If most of the servicemen are home by Jan 2013, doesn’t that mean we’ll have begun withdrawing by Jan 2012? What, everyone’s decided to join hands and sing kumbaya by then? His 100 years comment was more credible.
Rick Taylor
In 2013, there will be ponies!
Dennis - SGMM
McCain’s conditions for withdrawing troops from Iraq is based on a chain of “ifs” so long as to confound probability and he knows it.
If the Shia and the Sunnis (Including the Salafists) decide to sing Kumbaya after being at each other’s throats for a thousand years, if the Kurds give up their own agenda, if the contending militias decide to work together and support the central government. if the thousands of Iraqi professional people decide to return to the country…
The only difference between McCain’s plan for Iraq and Nixon’s for Vietnam is that people will be fighting their way into helicopters from rooftops in Baghdad and the copters will later be pushed off the carrier decks into the Persian Gulf.
PK
In 2013 he might be dead.
nightjar
After his speech, MCcain was seen in the iconic drab of a true reformer.
Punchy
Fuck. Now the terrists will just hide in their spider-holes for 4.7 more years, eating ramen, and will know to burst forth in Feb. 2013 AND DESTROY THE WHOLE WORLD.
Since when did it become kool to give timetables, McCant?
Ripley
Umm, the war was “over” in May of 2003, Mr. McCain.
Read the fucking banner, Old Man!!
Rick Taylor
With McCain, the Republican party has completed it’s metamorphosis into the Tinkerbell party. Just clap your hands and believe.
TheFountainHead
Don’t worry, he’ll have forgotten he said it by 2010.
Then he’ll forget that he forgot.
Then he’ll accuse you of making things up and putting words in his mouth.
At least, that’s how it works with my Dad, and he’s not even 60 yet!
wasabi gasp
Either, Grampa McCain has magical crystal ball future vision or he just emboldened the enemy with his timetable.
You gotta look on the bright side of life, so I’ll go with the wizard powers.
The Populist
Doesn’t the Aztec calendar end in 2012? Some say the end will come in December of that year. FUnny, I wonder if he knows this?
Librarian
Yeah, all the damage from the American invasion and occupation and the civil war it caused will be completely repaired by then.
Dennis - SGMM
I have to admit that I didn’t think things through. Of course Iraq in 2012 will be just as McCain says it will – and they’ll all like us and want to hang out with us, they’ll have flying cars and robots to do all the work and really cool personal rocketships and air conditioned cities with big plastic domes over them and bases on Mars and…
TheFountainHead
You would think a guy who has lived as long as he has would get by now that predictions made this far in advance are often idiotic, at best. I mean, this guy got to see every iteration of the COMPUTER in his lifetime.
Rick Taylor
They’re positioning him as the father figure, the wise beneficent elder leader that will make everything right; just don’t ask too many questions. It’s interesting comparing his recent 2013 ad with the Hillary Clinton Christmas campaign ad that made conservatives gag, where she was giving away the gifts under the tree. The trouble for McCain is, we just had a father figure who didn’t work out.
Calouste
So Senator McCain, shall we go in a bit more detail about those terrible sacrifices? How many of those servicemen and women shall America have to welcome back home in a bodybag? How many will be welcomed home with less limbs than they set off with? How many will commit suicide within one year of being welcomed back home?
Dennis - SGMM
The Maverick McCain will pull the gifts out of his capacious cheek pouches.
Dennis - SGMM
“My administration has, of course, turned its back on them,” he added.
Rick Taylor
Some reporter really needs to ask McCain specifically about this. When do we begin disbanding the badr brigades? Or is he speaking only of some militias but not others? It’s times like this I wish we had a competent and well informed press corps.
scav
So he keeps promising things will happen before (the gas tax holiday) and after (this) his administration. Gee Willikers, the powah of the Repub Brand is some kind of awesome.
Tony J
Shorter McCain – “Elect me and I’ll fix Iraq in one term, so you don’t have to worry about that. But if I can’t, I’ll just blame the Democrats for four years of Congressional underfunding and campaign in 2012 as the incumbent who could have got America out of Iraq if the damn Democrats hadn’t tied my hands. Which is torture, by the way, and I’d know.”
kwAwk
I’m curious if you guys ever stopped to think that possibly we couldn’t achieve a better result in Iraq with more competant management of the war effort, and a more concentrated focus on results?
This is something that has been bothering me since the elections in 2006 and the Surge. We all know know the George W. Bush is a clusterfuck failure of the President, so why do we not think that a better leader and better manager couldn’t do a better job in Iraq?
ps – And I want to preface this debate by saying that I don’t want to rehash the reasons for going into Iraq, only to discuss our policy going forward.
Rick Taylor
The obvious question is, what will he do if things in Iraq don’t go the way he says they will.
It’s not a timetable for retreat, because he’s specifically predicating withdrawal on things being wonderful so we don’t need troops in Iraq. But what if the Iraqis don’t cooperate with his plan, what then? That’s the question he can’t answer. If he says we stay and fight, then all the attacks on him for his one hundred years comment are justified. If he says, then we did our best but we can’t stay there forever, then he’s advocating a timetable for surrender.
Rick Taylor
What are we doing in Iraq? What is our purpose in being there? What is our goal, and how is what we’re doing getting us to that goal? It’s up to people who want to continue the occupation to make coherent arguments as to why we’re there and what we hope to accomplish, and why it would be worth the costs. So far I haven’t heard anything convincing.
So, more focus on what results? More competent management to do what? Right now we seem to be inserting ourselves into internecine conflicts in Iraq, taking up the side of certain Shitte militias against others, while buying off the Sunni militias and hoping that the support we give them doesn’t eventually result in a bloodier civil war.
ScottF
Also, candy and flowers. And lollipop mountains.
nightjar
No. The people of Mesopotamia have been fighting with one another for 1400 years and the idea the USA is going to ride in on a white horse and get them straightened out is ludicrous . And now it is tragic and will get more so the longer we stay. Read what the great right wing icon Winston Churchill has to say about Iraq when GB was trying to do what we are now.
Fledermaus
Damnit, Rick! You’ve already been told to pay no attention to that man behind the curtan. The correct answer is “Spread Freedom(tm) with guns and bombs!”
Calouste
First, it’s not a war, it’s an occupation. And the only long term solution to an occupation is to pull out (almost) all the troops. Unless of course you want to absorb the occupied territory permanently into your country.
Second, the handling of the occupation in the last 5 years has been such a clusterfuck that it is hard to imagine that things can be recovered within a decent timeframe. The United States have chosen sides in internal Iraqi conflicts, and then changed sides. They have bombed and shot civilian targets, accidentally or not, angering the population. And they have maintained a force at such a level that there were enough targets for the insurgents, but not enough troops to bring the country under control.
The Moar You Know
kwAwk: You cannot beat a people into democracy, nor can you occupy them until they decide to play nice with each other. For chrissakes, read some history.
There are not going to be any “better results” no matter what is done there. The only two things we could do that would make anything change is either nuke the entire country into a sheet of radioactive glass, or leave.
Jake
For the love of Christ. It doesn’t matter what’s possible, only what’s plausible.
huppy
What’s so special about 2013? Well, that’s the year McInsane will say, “Just wait until 2017, that’s when our troops will be home.” If he gets a chance.
kwAwk
Rick Taylor Says:
I won’t go so far as to say we can achieve the neo-con vision of Iraq as a beacon of freedom through out the middle east, but I will say that I’m not entirely convinced that we can’t achieve the results as somewhat articulated by Bush of an Iraq that is relatively stable, isn’t a threat to its neighbors, with a relatively democratic government and growing prosperity.
I think that starts with the notion of actually signing a peace treaty with Iraq that denotes some of the responsibilities the Iraqis have along with what the US will commit to. It should also include a timeline for achieving these goals and a definitive path to the end of the US occupation. Setting date for which we will be leaving, say 5 years from now, takes away some of the incentive for the insurgent groups to attack our troops. It lets them know that we won’t be driven out of Iraq, but also lets them know that we will be leaving at a certain point so that both sides better prepare for what comes next.
Isn’t it just as callous and cavalier to pull our troops out of Iraq without regard for the consequences as it was to send our troops into Iraq without regard for the consequences?
Fledermaus
As of right now Bush and company has said we’re not leaving at all and we will never leave until we’re done – Doesn’t seem to have made much difference in the attacks, has it?
kwAwk
Well I think we all agree that Bush is a first class moron, so what does it really matter what he says?
As far as the insurgent attacks they are trying to drive us out in spite of our declared statements by Bush that we are going to be there forever, and the reluctance of the Bush administration to say that we don’t want permenant bases in Iraq gives them that much more incentive to try to drive us out.
Jay B.
Iraq 2013, where raging sectarian violence and roaming gangs aren’t a big problem anymore.
What a visionary.
The GOP isn’t just going to lose in November — it’s going to be all but erased. I’m not saying this as a partisan Democrat (even though I am), I’m saying this because they have a 120-year old coot as their standard bearer, they have the worst president in American History as their current leader, they can’t win in a ruby red district in Mississippi, they’ve installed two failed wars, produced a shitty economy and all they can say after 7 long years of war and turmoil is “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
A crushing landslide defeat.
nightjar
First of all, none of the dem candidates have proposed completely abandoning Iraq. Just pulling back away from a street level occupation and meddling with their politics. The only possibility way for some semblance of normality down the road is if the Iraqi’s themselves believe that they alone have created a new Iraq. Past Civil wars in this region have not generally ended in genocide. However, if this does occur, I for one believe we have a moral duty to intervene in such a case.
And as for AQ in Iraq, when we leave they will as well or the Iraqi’s will kill them. The point is, as long as we’re occupying their country there will be no lasting reconciliation between the waring camps and this was true the day we crossed the berm from Kuwait. And regardless of how this disaster was managed. It’s what the neocons turned a blind eye to from the beginning– History.
Xenos
John McCain: Not older than Dr. Ruth Westheimer, but just by a matter of eight years.
biscuits
McShame! McShaft! Mc…Oh jeez, what a nightmare.
Jack H.
2013 – everlasting life achieved, flying unicorns replace cars …
Delia
Is this some sort of joke? We’ve gone in and blown up the country. How do you build a stable, democratic, prosperous country when you’ve destroyed the infrastructure and blown it up? The various factions are fighting us to get us out of there so they can rebuild and return to some semblance of normality. I can’t say as I blame them.
Yeah, only if you take your basic White Man’s Burden view of the world. As I said, we’ve basically gone in and blown stuff up. To now pretend that we have a pathway to peace and stability for the Iraqis is pretty much the height of arrogance. Yeah, there are insurgent groups now that weren’t there before. We made things really shitty. And we can’t fix them. The hard truth is, we broke something we don’t understand and only the Iraqis can’t fix it.
See above. This is just an excuse to stay forever. The Vietnamese had to fix the mess we made of their country. The Iraqis are going to have to fix the mess we’ve made of theirs. We are very good at trashing other people’s homes and extremely bad at fixing the damage.
Delia
Correction:, we broke something we don’t understand and only the Iraqis
can’tcan fix it.kwAwk
nightjar Says:
Certainly none of the democrats have laid claim to a policy of lets abandon Iraq completely, but they have been in a race to see who could claim that they area going to withdraw the forces the most quickly. And I agree that the Iraqis have to be the ones to make the terms of a new Iraq, but not necessarily alone.
That is why I think that the notion of a peace treaty is a big part of what is missing in this case. The a peace treaty would put in writing and have to be approved by the US and Iraqi legislature what the terms of are the peace and what the terms are of US withdrawl. It would give the Iraqis ownership of their end of the process, a process to which they have agreed and consented to to end the US occupation. That would be a much better situation than the present one of us simply barking out orders for them to build a specific type of country on a specific timeline.
I have been wondering for a year and a half why there is no Democratic voice on this issue other than Joe Lieberman who simply wants to like Bush’s boots and be just as silly as Bush himself, and think this is an issue that could haunt Democrats in the fall if McCain is willing to by that point throw Bush and Co. under the bus.
Davis X. Machina
Our war, such as it was, was with Saddam. Why do we need to sign a peace treaty with the present government in Iraq? We’re not at war with them. We’re there to help them — or so I have been repeatedly told.
Soylent Green
That statement is moronic. You pulled it right out of your ass. We are occupying their country with heavily armed troops who blow civilians away if they get in the way or look at us funny. This is as much an insult and humiliation to them as it would be to us if a foreign army was occupying the United States. Here it would be Red Dawn everywhere you looked, guerrilla fighters bravely taking out the occupiers every chance they got. There is no difference whatsoever. Promising to leave five years from now, or next week, means nothing. Labelling everyone who hates our presence in their country an “insurgent” is bullshit military speak useful for justifying the occupation indefinitely.
I hope the Iraqi factions can work out solutions for themselves, without bloodshed, although it seems unlikely. The nation itself is a fiction invented by Winston Churchill; the only glue that ever holds it together is a tyrannical ruler. The Bush administration is not interested in Iraqi democracy and self-determination; it wants the place to remain weak and compliant with our wishes so that we can get away with maintaining permanent bases there while keeping other nations’ hands off our oil. That has been the master plan since Cheneyco drew it up back in the mid-90s.
We need to get our people off the Iraqi street altogether and to take no sides when the militias and government (which is in essence just one of the militias) duke it out. It’s their struggle for power, over which we have no real control.
How many more Americans in fucking bodybags will it take to wake you shitheads up?
Davis X. Machina
How many more Americans in fucking bodybags will it take to wake you shitheads up?
Bodybags won’t do it — only defeat at the polls. From its inception to this latest plan for Victory in Two-Oh-One-Three this hasn’t been a war, it’s been the world’s most expensive campaign commercial.
kwAwk
Delia – I guess I would question who you think besides us is better equipt with the resources necessary to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure? And do you really think that what all of the fighting between sects over in Iraq is about is simply pushing us out?
As far as the White Man’s Burden nothing could be further from the truth. To paraphrase Colin Powell, we broke it and we bought it. We made the mess therefore it is really important that we do what ever is necessary to try to put it back together. If that means sacrificing a couple thousand more of our troops to save a million Iraqi lives then that is what it means.
It is racist and/or elitist to say that shia and sunni can’t get along, and in some ways it fits right into the wingnut mindset that brings us the whole ‘we can’t negotiate with Iran cause their religions commands them to kill all jews’.
I served in Iraq, and one of the things that I learned, taught by the US Marine Corps is that there are Christians living in Iraq. There are Christian churches in Iraq. There have been for a thousand of years. Iraq is also the birth place Shia Islam which was founded in 680 ad. Given that the modern Iraq has a large Shia and Sunni population it should demonstrate to you that these people have been living side by side for centuries.
Saying that this is a problem that is as old as time itself prevents us from addressing the real issues surrounding the major problems in the middle east. It isn’t a problem of Muslim vs Christian, or Shia vs Sunni, what it is really a problem of Post Colonialism and Post WWII US foreign policy.
Can you imagine how much the Germans and French would hate us now if we had after WWII found the decendents of William II and Louis XVI and re-installed them as the monarchs of their respective countries? Can you imagine how much the Israelis would hate us if after they had established a democracy the late 1940s we had decided that because they had some natural resouce we wanted, we would overthrow their democratic government and installed a tyrannical dictator?
Well that is exactly what we did in the middle east in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yeman, Oman, Iraq and Iran. That is why they hate us, not because they hate Mtv and Abercrombie and Fitch, it is because we in the west have treated them as less than equals for decades if not centuries.
This is why I think that offering to negotiate a final peace treaty with them would help significantly. Even after the Gulf War we were willing to negotiate a peace treaty with Saddam Hussein, but because this wasn’t a declared war and we actually went in and destroyed the government completely this time, we didn’t do it after this war. It really comes down to offering to them the respect of allowing them to have a say in how this occupation ends.
kwAwk
Soylent Green Says:
Ofcourse I pulled it out of my ass, do you hear anybody else talking about it? But that isn’t the point really, the point is that if you present the insurgents with the prospect of knowing that they aren’t going to drive us out, but at the same time knowing that we are going to leave at some point, they don’t have quite the incentive to risk their own lives to try to drive us out.
As far as the whole military thing, I served in Iraq and can assure you that had I gone around shooting everybody who looked at me funny I would be sitting in Leavenworth right now, not posting on this blog.
Certainly there is a wedge that has been driven between our military and the Iraqi population because of the tactics used by the suicide bombers, but the problems tend to come in when Iraqis violate the buffer zone around convoys which they are pretty accustomed to right now. There are bad apples for sure, but the overwhelming majority of military people in Iraq aren’t going around killing people for the sake of killing people.
Insurgent is a technical military term for a populace that is revolting against an occupying force. The idiot Bush’s problem lies in calling every insurgent a terrorist. There is a big difference between the two.
Rick Taylor
That is a tough one. After the first gulf war, the Iraqis did a fine job of restoring their own infrastructure. It is a shame we depended upon outside contracters rather than Iraqi’s after we invaded. By now, with so many of the professional classes refugees or emigres, that’s probably not possible any more.
This is continuing from the previous thread, but I wonder if intervention isn’t doing as much harm as good. As an example, by propping up the current government, we encourage Maliki to fight with Sadr, as if goes badly, he can turn to us for help. Similarly, Maliki suffers no consequences when he publicly states there’s no reason to seek reconciliation with Sunni groups. A strong central democratic Iraqi government is not possible now; the best that can be hoped for is peaceful co-existence of the various centers of power. I think we do have a roll in negotiation and most important pulling in outside powers into negotiation. I’m not convinced in the long run Iraqi stability is best served by having over a hundred thousand foreign troops on its soil.
Who would we negotiate with? The Iraqi government? Local governments?
gex
Man, I wish we could vote on comments. +1 billion.