ThinkProgress.org (June 3, 2008)

Jonah Goldberg Falsely Claims McCain Has Been ‘Consistently Right About The War’ In Iraq

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed today, National Review contributing editor Jonah Goldberg attacks Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) record on Iraq, arguing that he “may indeed have great judgment, but his record shows little experience employing it.” As a counterpoint, Goldberg claims that “the supposedly dogmatic” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has “been consistently right about the war.”

As evidence, Goldberg recalls three times in the past five years that McCain was critical of the Bush administration’s Iraq strategy:

In the summer of 2003, in response to the upswing in violence, he called for “a lot more military” in order to win in Iraq. He publicly “lost confidence” in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. In May 2004, McCain told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that “we’ve got to adjust to the realities of the situation as it exists, and that means doing whatever is necessary and acting decisively.”

Ah, but Goldberg forgets so much about McCain’s record and rhetoric on Iraq.

For instance, despite McCain’s 2007 claim that he knew from the beginning that Iraq was “going to be long and hard and tough,” he was one of the most vocal cheerleaders declaring before the war that it would be “easy”:

- “Because I know that 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.” [CNN, 9/24/02]

- “We’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. We may have to take out buildings, but we’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.” [CNN, 9/29/02]

- “But the point is that, one, we will win this conflict. We will win it easily.” [MSNBC, 1/22/03]

In terms of being just flat wrong, predictions can’t get any worse than McCain’s April 9, 2003 claim on ABC that “the end is very much in sight.”