Maybe It's Just Age That Causes The Contradictions

John McCain sez he opposed Mission Accomplished at the time.

On Thursday, the fifth anniversary of Bush’s dramatic landing on an aircraft carrier where the banner hung, McCain said, “I thought it was wrong at the time.” […]

McCain said he can’t blame Bush for the banner. After shifting explanations, the White House eventually said the “Mission Accomplished” phrase referred to the carrier’s crew completing its 10-month mission, not the military completing its mission in Iraq.

John McCain does not recall.

“Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom demonstrated to the world what we saw just 12 years ago. We went to war as the most combat-ready force in the world. The value of that readiness is clear. We won a massive victory in a few weeks, and we did so with very limited loss of American and allied lives. We were able to end aggression with minimum overall loss of life, and we were even able to greatly reduce the civilian casualties of Afghani and Iraqi citizens.

“In order to understand the issues involved, it is necessary to recognize just how difficult it is to achieve the kind of readiness we had during Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. Readiness is not solely a matter of funding operations and maintenance at the proper level. It is not only a matter of funding adequate numbers of high quality personnel, or of funding superior weapons and munitions, strategic mobility and propositioning, high operating tempos, realistic levels of training at every level of combat, or of logistics and support capabilities.

“Readiness, in fact, is all of these things and more. A force beings to go hollow the moment it loses its overall mix of combat capabilities in any one critical area. Our technology edge in Afghanistan and Iraq would have been meaningless if we did not have men and women trained to use it. Having the best weapons system platforms in the world would not have given us our victory if we had not had the right command and control facilities, maintenance capabilities, and munitions.”

Like I said, this could just be age. So could this.

CAVUTO: ... Senator -- after a conflict means after the conflict, and many argue the conflict isn't over.

MCCAIN: Well, then why was there a banner that said 'mission accomplished' on the aircraft carrier? ... the conflict -- the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished.

In his defense, John McCain is a ridiculously old man. He also thought we won the war until it became politically unpalatable to say that.

UPDATE: Take the Bush/McCain challenge. Better than the Pepsi Challenge, mainly in that you don't have to drink Pepsi to do it.

Mission Accomplished

Happy Anniversary!

Yes, 5 years ago manly George Bush strode onto that aircraft carrier in his flight suit and codpiece and made the national media swoon.

Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a “hero” and boomed, “He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.” PBS' Gwen Ifill said Bush was “part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan.” On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, "The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a -- on a carrier landing. This must be very meaningful to the United States military."

When Bush’s jet landed on an aircraft carrier, American casualties stood at 139 killed and 542 wounded.

We were also apparently going to shrink to two divisions by the fall of 2003. And Maureen Dowd told us that Bush was dead sexy and the greatest American since Gary Cooper (or Tom Cruise!):

The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.

He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics. Compared to Karl Rove’s ‘‘revvin’ up your engine’’ myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like Lizzie McGuire.

This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MiG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.

Apparently these people still sleep at night.

It didn't work out as planned, by the way, because it could NEVER work out. Occupying a country in the Middle East, destroying their infrastructure and stirring up all sorts of sectarian resentments was doomed to failure. It wasn't that we were simply incompetent (though we were), it wasn't that if we did a couple things better it would have turned out fabulous. The war was predicated on a fiction, and afterwards the Shiites were going to persecute the Sunnis as retribution, and nobody was going to tolerate an occupier.

While the media continues to talk about random pastors (you go, John Kerry!), we are stuck in Iraq with no end in sight, with no good options left, 4,000 American soldiers dead, 30,000 wounded, maybe 200,000 Iraqis dead or more, 4.7 million Iraqis displaced, trillions of dollars spent, and a nation tarnished.

UPDATE: This is from Democratic House candidate Eric Massa: