In this article, columist Frank Rich disagrees with the Democrat candidates hammering on McCain's "100 years in Iraq". He thinks that McCain has far more disturbing attributes than that misunderstood remark. Here are snippets from the column.

* "The sum total of his public record suggests that he could well prolong the war for another century — not because he's the crazed militarist portrayed by Democrats, but through sheer inertia, bad judgment and blundering. "

* "So far his bizarre pronouncements have been drowned out by the Democrats' din. They've also been underplayed by a press that coddles Ol' Man Straight Talk and that rarely looks more deeply into the "surge is success" propaganda than it did into Mr. Bush's announcement of the end of "major combat operations" five years ago.
Even fewer noticed that the presumptive Republican nominee seemed at least as oblivious to what was going down (in Basra. Eb) as President Bush, no tiny feat."

* "Mr. McCain was just as wrong about Basra as he was in 2003, when he said the war would be "brief" and be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. Or as he was in the 1990s, when he championed extravagant State Department funding for the war instigator Ahmad Chalabi, who'd already been branded untrustworthy by the C.I.A."

* "As for Basra, Mr. McCain told Joe Klein of Time in January that it was "not a problem." He told John King of CNN while in Baghdad last month that Mr. Sadr's "influence has been on the wane for a long time." When the battle ended last week, Mr. McCain said: "Apparently it was Sadr who asked for the cease-fire, declared a cease-fire. It wasn't Maliki. Very rarely do I see the winning side declare a cease-fire." At least the last of those sentences was accurate. It was indeed the losing side — Maliki's — that pleaded for the cease-fire."

* "But Mr. McCain's bigger strategic picture, immutable no matter what happens on the ground, is foggier still. Like Mr. Bush, he keeps selling Iraq as the central front in the war on Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda was not even a participant in the Basra battle, which was an eruption of a Shiite-vs.-Shiite civil war."

* "Mr. McCain is also fond of portraying Mr. Maliki's "democracy" in Iraq as an essential bulwark against Iran; his surrogate Lindsey Graham habitually refers to Mr. Sadr's Mahdi Army as "Iranian-backed militias." But the political coalition and militia propping up Mr. Maliki are even closer to Iran than the Sadrists."

* "We're succeeding," Mr. McCain said after his last trip to Iraq. "I don't care what anybody says." Again, it's the last sentence that's accurate."

* "Mr. McCain's doomed promise of military "victory" in Iraq is akin to Wile E. Coyote's perpetual pursuit of the Road Runner, with much higher carnage. This isn't patriotism."


The Whole Article