What if we had a president who could not admit a mistake, ever? And what if he made mistakes fairly often?
Republican John McCain pushed back on Wednesday against Democratic criticism that he misstated when the troop buildup ordered by President Bush began, saying elements were put in place before Bush announced the strategy in early 2007…. At issue are McCain’s comments in a Tuesday interview with CBS. The Arizona senator disputed Democrat Barack Obama’s contention that a Sunni revolt against al-Qaida combined with the dispatch of thousands more U.S. combat troops to Iraq to produce the improved security situation there. McCain called that a “false depiction.”
In essence, John McCain has the cart before the horse in stating that the surge was what brought about the Anbar Awakening. And yet the history of this happening are so easy to research.
Do we really need another George Bush for the next four years who cannot admit when he makes a mistake? Oh and don’t miss CBS’s badge of dishonor in all this mess.
It was the proto-blogger Spencer Ackerman who, yesterday evening, first identified McCain’s error. The Colonel MacFarland to whom McCain referred in the Couric interview “is now a one-star general, and his name is Sean MacFarland,” Ackerman writes. “He was commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, based in Ramadi in 2006 and early 2007 and is a key figure in embracing the Anbar Awakening before it even had that name.”
Ackerman goes on to quote MacFarland’s explanation of the surge, which he gave in a press conference to Pam Hess, then of UPI, on September 29, 2006—which was, Ackerman notes, “at least two months before Bush decided upon the surge, and about three before he announced it to the public”:
With respect to the violence between the Sunnis and the al Qaeda—actually, I would disagree with the assessment that the al Qaeda have the upper hand. That was true earlier this year when some of the sheikhs began to step forward and some of the insurgent groups began to fight against al Qaeda. The insurgent groups, the nationalist groups, were pretty well beaten by al Qaeda.
This is a different phenomena [sic] that’s going on right now. I think that it’s not so much the insurgent groups that are fighting al Qaeda, it’s the—well, it used to be the fence-sitters, the tribal leaders, are stepping forward and cooperating with the Iraqi security forces against al Qaeda, and it’s had a very different result. I think al Qaeda has been pushed up against the ropes by this, and now they’re finding themselves trapped between the coalition and ISF on the one side, and the people on the other.
“For McCain to say that the Anbar Awakening is the product of the surge,” Ackerman concludes, “is either a lie or professional malpractice for a presidential candidate who is staking his election on his allegedly superior Iraq judgment.”
