McCain Gets it Right on Iraq

Jonathan Last argues that John John McCain's right on Iraq:

Barack Obama frequently chastises people for contributing "more heat than light" to the public debate. An admirable sentiment. I wish he would adhere to it more regularly himself.
A Democratic line is emerging about Sen. John McCain that is voiced daily by Sen. Obama (and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton) in the presidential campaign.

"Senator McCain said the other day that we might be mired for 100 years in Iraq," Obama says, "which is reason enough not to give him four years in the White House." Or more directly, as Obama told a Houston audience, McCain "says that he is willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq."

Obama's claims are, at best, deliberately misleading. At worst, they are the type of politics-as-usual distortion that the Illinois senator usually decries. No one, in politics or the media, who voices the "100 years" canard is being fair-minded. So let's put it to rest now, once and for all:

On Jan. 3 in Derry, N.H., a voter prefaced a question to McCain by saying, "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years . . ." Here, McCain cut him off, interjecting, "Make it a hundred."

The voter tried to continue his question, but McCain pressed on: "We've been in . . . Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. It's fine with me, I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaeda is training, equipping and recruiting and motivating people every single day."

McCain's analysis is, objectively speaking, exactly correct. Throughout history, U.S. troops have remained in the field long after the conclusion of successful wars....

The key to McCain's "100 years" comment is his qualifier: "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." It is this crucial component that distinguishes military successes from failures.

A commitment to Iraq in which U.S. forces are being harmed for 100 years (or even 20 or 10) is not sustainable; such a situation would indicate the United States was not able to midwife a viable political environment. Iraq would then be a failure. John McCain knows that.

But if the Iraqi political infrastructure continues to coalesce, if the violence continues to trend downward, if the Iraqi military and police continue to assume larger and larger roles in their country's affairs, then a presence of U.S. troops in Iraq for a long duration is an exceptionally good outcome. It would signal that, despite all of the Bush administration's many failures, the Iraq project was not for naught.

McCain's "100 years" is not a commitment to "100 years of war," as Obama claims. It is simply another sign of McCain's seriousness and understanding of the realities of foreign affairs in general and Iraq in particular.

Obama's distortion of this remark, however, is the first sign that he may not be a serious-minded candidate.

See also my earlier post, "100 Years in Iraq? The Left Takes Aim at McCain."