McCain declares 'we have succeeded' in Iraq
By Steve Benen Friday Jul 18, 2008 6:00pmHere’s a video of an informal press conference McCain held in Michigan.
The audio is a little tough to hear, so to clarify, McCain insisted that “we have succeeded” in Iraq. In fact, he said it multiple times: “I am happy to stand in front of you to tell you that this strategy has succeeded. It has succeeded. It has succeeded.”
(It reminds me of the time Marge Simpson told Bart that Springfield is “a part of us all. A part of us all. A part of us all.” She then explained it would help him remember and believe the line if she repeated it this way.)
OK, McCain probably misspoke again. He must have meant that he thinks Bush’s strategy is “succeeding,” not has “succeeded,” right?
Wrong. He's now referring to Bush's Iraq policy in the past tense, as if the war is over.
McCain added on the campaign bus: “I repeat my statement that we have succeeded in Iraq — not we are succeeding — we have succeeded in Iraq.”
Gotcha. It’s over. We won. The policy worked — not is working, but worked. Good to know.
In a political context, McCain had a series of rhetorical options. He could say that we will succeed in Iraq, but Americans have grown impatient. He could say that we’re in the process of succeeding, but that’s not quite good enough, either. So, McCain just made up his mind — we’ve already succeeded. We may not know it, and this victory may be limited to McCain’s over-active imagination, but it happened. Just trust him and don’t ask any questions.
Can we get out of Iraq, then? Apparently not: “The success that we have achieved is still fragile and could be reversed.”
I have to say, I thought “success” was going to look a little more successful, but maybe that’s just me.
McCain, like Bush, considers this “mission accomplished.” I guess neither want to be taken especially seriously.
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Does that mean the troops will be coming home soon?
Poor grampy. He just repeats and repeats himself. Doesn't know what he's talking about, but it sounds good to him.
McSame will change that story tomorrow. He can't keep one story straight for 24 hours. What a loser.
Ruthless People @ 1:
you beat me to it...
Ruthless People @ 1:
No this means that the troops get to stay, didn't you get the memo?
Oh Goody! The war is over, we won,he's the hero. we are going to have a parade and McCain is going to be in charge of the CONFETTI!
"Succeed, Succeeded, Successed, Sucked."
See, we will have success when we reach that 'time horizon' over there...
Put your teeth back in gramps, I can barely understand ya!
JimboSlice @ 5:
I guess they're going to need help building the world's largest embassy. The new US Embassy in Baghdad. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article2364255.ece
McCain said (in that interview) "I know how to win wars..."
We saw how well the Viet Nam War went for you.
WTF... 4,122 dead Americans with only one killed Friday is success? Mr. McCain you have a fucked up sense of reality, The Iraq War has not been won since the demolition of the Golden Dome Mosque. Two, three, four dead a day is not success, Sir!
Puts me in mind of the Looney Tunes cartoons where Daffy -- spoofing some classic movie -- is battered beyond hope and crawls over to announce, in a slurred, punchy voice, "Hello ma, hello pa, it was a great fight. I'm glad I won." just before collapsing.
enor @ 10:
McCain graduated at the bottom of his class, managed to get shot down, trumpets being in a war we lost.
but he knows how to win!
what a f#cking ass-wipe.
the reichwingneocon gop is certifiable lunatics.
declare the whole bunch of them
enemy combatants and send them to gitmo.
from bush on down-------impeachment
is the only solution for f#cking criminals.
After they can't get the security "deal" they wanted ,and Maliki tells us to leave,
Dateline Baghdad 2108 @ 11:
He didn't finish his sentence - The war's a success.... for big oil. Paid for with the blood and treasure of middle America.
How does one deal with this? With children I can win by claiming adulthood, and treating them fairly. That doesn't work with an adult //////////////// who acts like a child.
Has he been taking stem cells from the shrub? I swear his asshollines quotient has risen lately.
enor @ 10:
"Mr. McCain, is that an empirical assertion? i.e., could you recount for us in detail the wars you've won on our behalf, and precisely how you achieved those victories?"
A question you'll never hear the MSM Court Composers ask him.
"We have succeeded" in neocon talk means "We have failed".
As a democrat I can say that I admired McCain for his service. But him running for president is an awful example of a war hero. He is wanting the attention so bad he will say anything over and over again and then tommorrow will deny that he said it. Poor McCain he really looks worn out like an old shoe. He needs to go home and retire. I don't mean no harm John but I am a senior citizen also. You make us all look bad. Please go and retire, you deserve that and so do we. Enough already.
Cool, let's bring our troops home.
Oh good. Does this also mean we can cancel orders for Pain Ray machines?
So the surge failed and according to McCain, that's a success. So I have another question for the Senator from Arizona: Since 90% of the levys in New Orleans held up during Katrina, did they succeed too?
Ruthless People @ 13:
For those of you, too young, let me illuminate what kind of 'heroes' these fly boys were in Viet Nam...
Most were dropping huge bombs from high altitude - carpet bombing entire villages off the map. The other pilots were incinerating innocent civilians in their villages with napalm. I am sure you've seen the pictures and the movies. We saw it on the news every night. It was a war we experienced every night in our living rooms.
So different than today - our government doesn't allow us to see the dead coming home every week. Rarely a funeral on the news. Maybe, locally when it comes close to home. We watched it on TV, not for our curiosity but a need to grieve as a nation. How can we now abandon all the mothers and fathers and wives and husbands and boys and girls and not share in their loss, and let them know we care as a nation.
This time around, we don't really know / feel this war. And that, thanks to our Administration, is no accident. It is carefully orchestrated by and with the press.
To fulfill their propaganda aims we are kept away, and they suffer alone.
You see, back then, the NV were hiding in the jungle, booby trapping and sniping our soldiers.
It was ugly and violent.
And, so tragic because, we as a nation shouldn't have been there in the first place. Like Iraq - it was an illegal war.
The soldiers on the ground, the helicopter pilots, the medics, etc., were the real heroes .They were all scared but pushed on - they knew the risks.
They were not pushing buttons to drop bombs thousands of feet above the war and returned to air conditioned comfort each evening with a soft bed and hot meals waiting for them.
Not MCCAIN. He was like an accidental tourist in that war. I am sorry he suffered, of course, but his captors knew a pilot was a valuable commodity, they were not going to kill him. They also knew he was the son of an Admiral.
He too was a victim of that war, and probably ( although one of his captors has publicly stated McCain was NOT tortured) if he had been, he had the fortitude to survive such conditions. (Like those in Abu Graib the will to live is very strong.)
But, I am sorry... the praise he gets, is as if, he threw himself on a grenade to save his buddies.
By his own writing he said he was ; 'surprised he was hit, because he was bombing from such a high altitude'.
He was a cowboy that crashed five navy planes while in service, he was last, but one in his class, a playboy that left his suffering wife while she writhed in pain with crushed legs and spine from a car crash who waited for him for years to return from war raising his children.
He rewards her by divorcing her for the rodeo queen. Behavior is everything. What a guy, what a hero. What a gigolo.
He led a pretty charmed life. He probably never thought he would die or end up in a prison camp.
It is the risks you know when you act that makes you a hero.
Gramps does ramble on incoherently doesn't he? Err...Iraq...err....success...err...Iraq.
I think I discovered McCain's education and foreign policy advisor http://youtube.com/watch?v=WALIARHHLII
"We've succeeded, but it's still fragile...."
What in the FUCK does that mean?
You can't get half-pregnant, McBush...
Hold it, we succeeded? Well, I guess that makes wrecking Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and turning a previously stable area into Africa Mk. 2 OK then.
Stupid, immoral, and evil.
We've succeeded ? But we still need to win ?
It must be time for McCrazy to take another one of his pills and go beddy-bye for a little mid-afternoon nappy.
He knows how to win wars....
You just declare victory and then you leave.
So John if you believe we succeeded, then it's time to leave.
Don't you know? It's time for that imaginary 'bump' in popularity that legacy-man's sycophants promised him. The "saving of Iraq" was a complete success. Where the hell have you been? [/heavy snark]
Either that or the new reich wing strategy is to pretend it's all over but the parades. Wait didn't they already do that?
Can you believe this clown? I'm sorry john, but you are a PATHETIC candidate...for ANY party.
This is the first time I've caught a glimpse of his "hidden side of his face". Ugh! I'm sorry, but shouldn't the public be made aware that this man has been undergoing medical treatment for melanoma (sp?) cancer?? I was shocked.
If American had a rational collective brain, Obama would be getting 100% of the vote in November. As it is, being a nation of fools and political partisanship, he'll win 52% to 47%. Just shows that nearly half this country has their heads up their asses, and they don't plan to pull them out anytime soon.
He's just showing his age again by using an obsolete definition of "succeed." All he means is, "We're passing this mess on to whomever comes after."
4 months before the election and we've succeeded! When can we expect gas prices to come down... about two months before the election?
MCCAIN . . . Just another ignorant and clueless member of the failed American elites who never reflect on the use of the term "war". War is declared by nation states on other nation states by those who are in power. It's a formal action and subject to the terms of the Geneva Convention. The US congress last declared war in 1941 on the Germans in retaliation for Hitler's declaration of war on the US. Every other US military action since then has been either an invasion or terrorism. Vietnam was not a war but an invasion of a sovereign nation and resulted in the death of millions, the dropping of more bombs (9 million tons) than were dropped by all of the Allies during WWII and 50 million liters of dioxin (the most toxic substance known to primates) and the devastation to a third world, agrarian nation. The tragedy continues to this day.
McCain: We have succeeded "militarilly, financial and politically". WTF?
Is this guy for real? What a total embarrassement he is for the Republican Party.
enor @ 24:
poor grampy, yelling at clouds and repeating himself over and over again, like he can't remember if he said it before.... next he'll be talking to himself
Can't watch... can't watch!!!! Now, what about adulterey?
Hulk @ 31........
The melanoma, skin cancer looks like it is getting worse. This is the first time I had seen his face in months. It wasn't this bad a while back. And did you notice the new lump coming up higher on his face. That wasn't there last year.
All this foolish talk about 'winning' and 'succeeding' that the Republicans do. Are they trying to incite the weaker guys, or what? All that bravado talk is going to cause a backlash like no one could imagine. They sound like junior high kids flaunting their macho egos against smaller victims. I don't believe at all that we have succeeded or will succeed at any time extending ad infinitum. We don't know or understand the culture of the enemy we continue to create.
.
America has succeeded to land a man on Mars...
... Now, we just need to get there.
.
"Does that mean the troops will be coming home soon?"
100 years soon enough? He didn't say they were coming home. He just said it was another mission accomplished day. After all, if you remember, bringing the troops home "isn't too important" to John McCain.
What is the current population of Iraq? How does that compare the number of Iraqis who lived under Saddam?
enor, if I may.
To be correct, McCain graduated 5th from the bottom, not last. His 1st wife, Carol, had two children from a former marriage to another Annapolis graduate when he married her. Her automobile accident happened after John was shot down. He did not discover this until after his release. McCain stayed married for 6 years before divorcing Carol for Cindy.
I see McCain as a person who, by the accident of birth, grew up an Admiral's son on military bases. I think during these formative years he learned how easy it is to get away with stuff when your father is an Admiral. Once in the Navy, John, the Admiral's son, muddled his way through Annapolis and struggled to earn his wings. Had he not been an Admiral's son he quite well may have washed out at several points.
Certainly surviving getting your plane shot down and then spending 5 years as a POW is an experience deserving appreciation from the country he served, but his experiences are not unique to him. Indeed, being an Admiral's son may have eased the treatment he received from his captors. Had he not been an Admiral's son he may well have been discharged from the Navy because of his injuries. As it were, he was allowed to earn his wings again, but the planes McCain flew were being phased out and he was not acceptable for retraining.
I suspect John's marriage to Carol gave an air of respectability to John in the eyes of Navy brass, but marriage didn't slow down the urges or encounters he had with other women after he married.
His four years as Naval Liaison to the Senate no doubt whet his appitite for politics and gave him a whole new class of women to dilly with. I suppose during his courtship with Carol he learned about Arizona politics and ultimately took advantage of the population growth that would give Arizona a new Represenative in Congress. To accomplish that he had to divorce Carol, marry Cindy, resign his commision and move to Arizona where he traveled the territory represenating his father-in-law's company.
There is no doubt that John McCain knows how the game, is played, he's been playing it his whole life. It appears, however, that he's attempting to game the system again, but I think the voters are tired of those who have feathered the nests of corporations as well as their own.
Unfortunately for John McSame and the republiscum party, they've plucked too many feathers from average Americans already. There's a whole class of chickens with feathers to spare that need to step forward and contribute their fair share while us naked birds recover. Or is that undressed birds, which is different as we learned from Feith.
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Great, I like the idea of a "gas tax holiday!" YEA!!! Money in my pocket... Right?
... However that doesn't bite into the pockets of the corporations currently raking in the M$O$N$E$Y... Then, who does it bite?
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john mccain, there you go again...
you say you know how to "win wars"?
how would that be? by getting shot down on a bombing run, singing like a canary & swindling rice patties from your shackled buddies?
by getting SHOT DOWN in an unjust war america lost, a war which resulted in the needless death of 58,000 of our boys, a war which no one from maine to highway 1 can tsay why we were in?
maybe you mean the war you won, in securing a beer fortune from a blow-up doll?
*say
$4 Gas... Mission Accomplished. Just don't photograph the cancer-ridden candidate from the left side... what an asshole...
McVomit, you lyin mother fucker! You know fucking well that the Bush Crime Family paid off the inSURGEnts....the very ones who were killing our troops! "the surge has succeeded" my black ass! Absolutely ZERO political reconciliation...the sole purpose of the surge in the first God damn place. McSHIT , IF YOU'RE NOT STEALING OBAMA'S IDEAS, YOU'RE JUST OUTRIGHT LYING YOUR WRINKLED ASS OFF!!! McGeezer has went from a pathetic candidate to feel pity for to a typical Repub sack of shit to be kicked in the teeth!
Hey John does that mean you can go back and vote in the Senate? You haven't voted since April 2nd. Don't you represent the state of AZ or is it just you stepping stone to the WH and the bush crime family? ?
With the success, I assume our troops will be starting to come home next week? Is that correct "my friend", John McBush? ? ?
We've succeeded, but it's delicate, so we can't claim victory.
Everything has gone right, but we can't leave because it might go bad.
I was right, except when I lied about what I said.
Out strategy for success was a strategy for failure before I changed it and stayed the course with more troops and made it an escallation for peace with more killing and less violence for more peace and success but not victory.
Now everyone will know he's insane.
*
not to worry...
he'll say the opposite tomorrow and the media will praise his political agility.
Trust me: give them this one.
The strategy has succeeded. The war is a stunning success. Iraq is permanently transformed. The world rejoices.
The. War. Is. Over.
When we all get what we all want, we all win.
I guess this is McCains Mission Accomplished speech. And correct me if I am wrong "We succeeded" is the same thing as we have won. In other wars succeeded means that. McCain loves Iraq. After all he was in deep dodo in 91 as a member of the Keating 5 and blocking an investigation into kickbacks from the SNLs when we went to war and McCain all the sudden cleared of wrong doing even though he did take money, block a federal investigation and let Keading pay for John McCain's family trips using bank invested money. Funny isn't it. He also even with Fox Lies cant win the race so he gives out travel information for Obama. This puts him in danger.
McCain says he knows how to win wars but the fact is the only war McCain saw was from 20,000 feet up and he has never seen someone get shot. And he has never decided or directed a battle strategy even in the Navy. He wasn't even in charge of a squadron in war time.
In the Marine Corps where i served we had Air, ground and Sea elements. Only generals controlled all 3. McCain only has dealings with air strikes. Nothing to do with ground wars.
enor @ 24:
Good post! That is something I could have written myself. You see, I was part of both scenarios you speak of. I was an aircrewman in "B" model Huey gunships, in the Mekong Delta. I did another tour, this time being a 'sneaky bastard', planting IR sensors around Ca Mau. I had the misfortune of missing an early out, by 2 weeks. I put in for Whidbey Island (WA State), which I got. But, I ended up in an A-6 Attack Squadron, which deployed 3 months later to Vietnam, aboard the Kittyhawk. So, I got to see the 'McCain war' too.
Pilots like McCain were flying and bombing from extremely high altitude. Certainly there was some danger involved, but it was not as great as some would have us believe. For example, I used to fly at 500-1000 feet, not 30,000-50,000 feet. The grunts used to be at ground zero. Any time I felt sorry for myself, all I had to do was consider the war they were fighting. Those are the heros. If you have not seen the movie "We were Soldier", you should consider doing so. There is some 'Hollywood' in it, but it is pretty faithful to the true events, that happened in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965.
McCain should be appreciated for his service, but so should a million other veterans.
In this country, the only measure of success is MONEY. We have lost our national honor; the citizenry is full of cowards being lead by fear mongers and liars. We aren’t much more than a nation of mental cripples.
All our leaders are corrupt and too easily influenced by men with wallets full of out and out bribes and extortion money. All branches of government are subject only to the whims and desires of the big money people and corporations, and the two political parties might as well merge as it is getting very difficult to tell where one ideology ends and the other begins as evidenced by the recent vote in both houses on the FISA / telecom immunity bill which degraded the Constitution.
The recent past has been witness to the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security which has absolute power of state government, the politization of the DOJ, thousands of signing statements by the executive nullifying laws enacted by the Congress, and the list goes on and on and on!
And who is left to protect John Q. Public? Absolutely no-one! Our one great hope was Obama, and even he failed us on the FISA legislation, and if the people don’t matter any more than that to him, what else will he fail us on?
We as a people have stood silently by while our so called President (dictator is more like it) has called our Constitution nothing more than a damn piece of paper all the while proudly wearing a flag pin on his lapel and expecting all in his camp to do likewise. And they do and groudly vote time and again against the peoples interests and instead in the interest of the money grubbers and corporations.
Reid and Pelosi, what a joke! Taking impeachment off the table was the sickest evil perpetrated against the PEOPLE by my party in my lifetime. Think about that, it is like telling everyone to go ahead and kill anyone you want because we don’t have the political will to ever hold you accountable for your actions anyway!
So, John, sorry but I reject each and every one of your assertions of SUCCESS in Iraq. The only thing we have succeeded in doing is vilifying ourselves in the world's eyes and making a bunch of worthless pieces of shit wealthier than even their greediest imaginations could have dreamt.
Last I heard, turning Iraq over to its own sovereign government, the one that we so proudly installed there (remember the purple fingers?), constitutes "surrender". (Huh?) Now apparently that crazy talking point has been replaced by the equally crazy "we've already won". Amazing. So can we leave now, Old Man?
Does he really believe what he's saying....we don't need another Bush!!
Ah...Mission Accomplished!! I can't tell you how good that makes me feel. I'm sure that makes the souls of the ~1.4 million dead feel better, too.
By all intents and purposes, we have succeeded in Iraq. Start your "+" and "-" chart, your goods and bads list, your pros and cons tally (save for the loss of American servicemen), and I believe history will agree with McCain's assessment. Certainly, the active government figures and the various souls ensuring the protection of individual property and rights under the germinating system of law would vouch for this success.
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