John McCain is droning on about staying in Iraq and as usual Tim Russert can only lob slow pitch softball questions.
Let’s assume McCain is an honorable guy with well thought views held with principle: in other words that he is different from Bush, Cheney and their kindergarten admininstration’s foreign policy by fairy tale.
He is still wrong. His only schtick is that if we fail in Iraq that “al Qaeda will follow us home”.
That is not a strategy for success in Iraq. And it is not even true. al Qaeda is already in the United States. All of our intelligence services say this. They are here because the Bush Administration has done nothing to fight al Qaeda and squandered our military in Iraq. McCain would continue the lunacy. Defeating terrorism is not simply a military exercise, it is a diplomatic and intelligence and criminal prosecution excercise. Squandering American lives and dollars in Iraq does not make us safer, it makes us weaker and more vulnerable because we are not fighting the people who attacked us.
McCain also continues to misrepresent the Democratic position on setting a time certain for American troops being taken out of the cross hairs in Baghdad. The so-called time table for withdrawal is an actual strategy that would force the Iraqis to take some responsibility for their own security, and free up our military to concentrate on actual threats to our country. The violence in Iraq is not fueled by al Qaeda but by the same kind of religious hatred that infected Northern Ireland and the Balkans. Religious wars are not won by an occupation.
No matter how he tries to put lipstick on Bush’s pig, McCain has absolutely nothing different to offer than the failed, incompetent policy brought to us by the infants currently in the White House.
The rest of the hour demonstrated that McCain is simply another politician on the right with no vision, no ability to see past the next election, and nothing to offer our country.
