Today’s from-the-campaign-trail-hubbub is the following statement made in a speech yesterday by John McCain:
This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.
To Time’s Joe Klein this is an especially outrageous statement:
This is the ninth presidential campaign I’ve covered. I can’t remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad.
My reaction to Klein’s assessment is threefold: 1) yes, there is clearly some desperation on the part of the McCain campaign, and this statement does represent something of a doubling-down on the surge, 2) however, it isn’t as if he hasn’t basically been making this argument for a while, and 3) really? the most “scurrilous” statement made by a made party candidate that Klein can remember. Really? 1
The basic argument that McCain is attempting to make here is as follows: McCain believes that he risked a great deal of political capital supporting the surge to the point that he put his political future on the line. He further believes that Obama knows that the surge worked, but won’t admit it because it would damage his campaign for president. (If one wants to see video of the statement, James Joyner has it).
In regards to the actual debate, two basic thoughts occur.
The Surge. Yes, the violence is significantly down in Iraq at the moment and the surge is part of why this is the case. However, we too easily dismiss the fact that other reasons exit. For example, neighborhoods that were once mixes of Sunni and Shi’a have been homogenized (by violence) and therefore some of the basis of the fighting was removed. Further, the Anbar Awakening started before the surge began (i.e., the surge didn’t cause the Anbar Awkening). Beyond that, to focus too much on Sunni tribal leaders rejecting AQI is to miss the point that the violence of most signifiance was Sunni v. Shi’a, not US/Iraq v. AQI (something that is too frequently conflated in this discussion). In other words, there is a multivariate equation here, and to reduce it to one policy action is to grandly oversimplify.
So yes, the surge helped quell the violence, but it was not the sole reason for the quelling. Beyond that, there is legitimate room for criticism of the policy in the sense that the stated reason for the surge was to create political space for the Iraqi government to solve an array of pressing problems. On that point, it is unclear that there has been substantial progress.
However, all of the above is preface and context to my basic point about the the surge, which is that to listen to the debate (including McCain’s new sound bite) about Iraq these days one would think that the entire war is to be understood almost solely in terms of the surge. It is as if the notion is if the surge can be said to have worked that that somehow confirms the policy. However, the bottom line is that the surge was a specific tactical move in response to one element of the broader policy. It is not the totality of policy on Iraq and we cannot evaluate all things Iraq based solely on the surge, regardless of what one thinks about it.
Defining Victory. While it is presented as a simple dichotomy between winning and losing, the honest fact of the matter is that it isn’t all that simple to know what “victory” or “defeat” will look like going forward. One can easily imagine glowing, happy victory wherein all is stable and wonderful and Iraq becomes a wholly functional democratic state that acts as a stabilizing influence on the region. One can likewise think of deepest, darkest defeat wherein in the Iraqi state collapses into chaos. While at the moment neither seems to be happening, the fact of the matter is that the darkest defeat scenario is still more likely that the glowing victory one.
Even setting aside those more extreme possibilities, I am curious as to how the candidates, especially McCain, define the concepts of “victory” and “defeat.” Aside from the obvious fact that winning is better than losing, it is unclear as to what these things are supposed to actually mean. One has to concede that apart from toppling Saddam, it is hard to say that any of our actual goals in Iraq (most specifically WMD-related issues) have come to fruition. At the moment “victory” seems to mean quelling violence that would not have existed had we not invaded in the first place. This is hardly a rousing version of “victory” to rally around.
Sphere: Related Content- I will confess that I an immediate counterexample doesn’t spring to mind, but still. [↩]
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:20 am
I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that you’re doing the same thing I’ve seen elsewhere: set up the strawman that McCain (or others) claim that The Surge, and only The Surge, was responsible for the recent diminution of violence in Iraq.
The more accurate statement, in my opinion, would be that The Surge was necessary to allow the reduction of violence, and opened the door for other factors to also play a role.
The points being, 1) the reduction in violence we’ve seen in Iraq over the past year wouldn’t have happened without The Surge (certainly a debatable point, but not an unreasonable one), 2) McCain called for The Surge for a very long time before the Bush Administration finally got around to implementing it, and 3) at no time has Obama supported The Surge, and denies that it had an effect on violence in Iraq.
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:35 am
@Boyd - I am sure that it is quite possible the McCain has a far more (dare I say it) nuanced view of the situation. However, that isn’t how he is presenting it on the stump. Further, it does seem to me to be the case that most proponents of the war have reduced the entire discussion down to the surge.
BTW, I don’t deny that McCain has a political asset in his support of the surge, and that he can use it to attack Obama. I still think, however, that Obama has the better of the situation politically when we look at the totality of the Iraq situation.
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:52 am
McCain appears to be trying to portray Obama as a “Surge denialist,” which has some merit, depending on an individual’s understanding of circumstances and history. Its effectiveness is yet to be determined.
Mostly, McCain’s summertime campaign strategy strikes me as marking time, filling space for the time being. Whether this is merely biding time until the “real” campaign begins, or it’s simply all he’s got in his quiver, we’ll see.
July 23rd, 2008 at 12:51 pm
[...] Blog, Newshoggers.com, Associated Press, Outside The Beltway, The Jed Report, The Moderate Voice, PoliBlog (TM), Political Machine, Right Wing News, The Other McCain, The Carpetbagger Report, Macsmind, Sister [...]
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
[...] about this: skippy the bush kangaroo (another great roundup there); The Newshoggers (Cernig); PoliBlog™; Outside The Beltway (slightly “Right”); The Moderate Voice (Elrod); The Anonymous [...]
July 24th, 2008 at 1:30 am
How about this for scurrilous: Obama’s insistence that he knows more about what McCain meant with his “I don’t mind being in Iraq for 100 years” comment than McCain does? Aside from the clear fact McCain would mind fighting another Hundred Years War, McCain is also on record that if Iraq formally asks us to leave (instead of simply dropping coy hints about liking one timetable over another), then we would leave ( http://hotair.com/archives/2008/07/23/new-votevets-ad-mccain-would-occupy-iraq-indefinitely-against-iraqi-wishes/ has a link to a statement from 2004).
Or how about the “but McCain was born in Panama” comments? Regardless of where he was born, McCains parents were US citizens, making him a natural born US citizen.
Factcheck’s archive should have more scurrilous behavior from previous campaings ( http://www.factcheck.org/archive/ ), as that’s kind of the reason for setting up Factcheck.
July 24th, 2008 at 10:01 am
I think Althaus had it right. This was a pretty good line by McCain and therefore had to be defined as out of bounds.
Most good lines can be attacked as racist statements by the Obama campaign. Since a good connection to racism couldn’t be made “you’re questioning his patriotism” bilge by a supporter is the next best thing.
July 24th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Being who you are, you’ve probably already seen the latest poll results: http://hotair.com/archives/2008/07/24/fox-news-poll-no-bounce-for-obama-from-trip-maliki-comments/ . I can’t explain them.
July 24th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
@Max Lybbert - In all honesty, I don’t put much stock in the polls at the moment.
At this juncture I think that all this will be cumulative. The percentage of the population aware of the Der Spiegel interview, amongst other things, is quite small at the moment. However, there will be commercials, conventions, debates, and news coverage galore about all of this stuff. I won’t start really taking the polls seriously until the conventions start.