Chutzpah Award - McCain Claiming He Was Right On Iraq?

[Median Democrat]

McCain is pounding his chest about the wisdom of his views on Iraq. However, what exact views are these?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25786855/

John McCain declared before the Iraq war: "There's no doubt in my mind that we will prevail and there's no doubt in my mind, once these people are gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators." --on the Iraq war, "Hardball" interview, March 24, 2003

Also, remember this McCainism: “There’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiahs. So I think they can probably get along.” (MSNBC, 4/23/03)

Mccain - "I believe that the success will be fairly easy." (9/24/02)

McCain - "We will win this conflict. We will win it easily." (1/22/03)

McCain - "Our technology, particularly air-to-ground technology, is vastly improved," McCain told CNN's Larry King on Dec. 9, 2002. "I don't think you're going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw, nor the length of the buildup, obviously, that we had back in 1991." It

Or, what about these three inconsistent beauties:

Sept 2002: “From everything I can tell that (Rumsfeld’s plan) seems to be a very good strategy.

McCain - On May 12, 2004, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, McCain was asked on "Hannity & Colmes" whether Rumsfeld could still be effective in his job. "Yes, today I do and I believe he's done a fine job," McCain responded. "He's an honorable man."

January 2008: “The point is, my friends, when Rumsfeld’s strategy was failing, I was the only one who stood up and said, it’s a failed strategy, and we gotta adopt a new strategy.”

Yet, the GOP claims that Barack Obama is the one with naive views on foreign policy?

[World Citizen]

1. He says whatever he thinks sounds good at that moment.

He has no real opinion or conviction.

In September of 2002, he warned us that there might be a few casualties: "As successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women." That same month, he told CNN, "We're not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad … we're not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies." And in early 2003, he promised viewers of MCNBC, "We will win this conflict. We will win it easily."

January 2007, though, he told MSNBC that he knew all along the Iraq war was "probably going to be long and hard and tough," and that he was "sorry" for those who voted for the war believing it would be "some kind of an easy task." "Maybe they didn't know what they were voting for," he said.

http://www.alternet.org/story/46745/

[vaberella]

2. Spin. Wait until Obama gets back and you'll hear exactly what Obama has to say.

Then he'll spin again. McCain is Mr. Flippity-Flop after all.

[jobycom]

3. Let him. Most Americans think Iraq was a mistake, so he just looks like an idiot.

Good collection of quotes, btw. Thanks.

[TlalocW]

4. An article I just read (probably linked from a DU post)

Is that it doesn't matter if McCain was right about the surge or not. The surge is past, old news. People are still wanting to bring the troops home, and only Barack is promising to do that. So McCain can thump his hollow chest all he wants on whether he was right or wrong, but as long as he's talking about keeping troops in Iraq for 100 years or more, no one is going to care who was right or wrong about the surge.

TlalocW