Another TPM Reader chimes in …
I haven’t ever understood what context the famous 100 years sound bite is really lacking. When McCain is given a chance to provide the missing context it seems to me to boil down to, “I don’t want you to picture it as staying in an Iraq like the present one, I like to picture it being easier and more fun.”
But if you look at each instance of the McCain 100 year boast, he is saying it to make the point that we mustn’t leave the hard, deadly, actual Iraq. That’s the whole context that he is, I think, being mercifully spared. The entire, nuanced version seems to me to be essentially this: There’s no point to leave Iraq once we’ve turned it into Korea. (In fact, he says, it would likely prove a handy base.) But, furthermore, it is unconscionable to leave until then. So there exists in the McCain Doctrine, as I understand it, absolutely no level of violence, no level of stability, no turn of events under which he would advocate leaving.
For him to want to amend the 100 years sound bite by saying, “yeah, but picture it being much less awful” isn’t really a substantive amendment when he means for us to stay in either event.
I’m going to try to put together a longer post on this for either tonight or tomorrow. But basically, it’s not just all the horrible stuff going on in Iraq. It’s the fact that McCain doesn’t grasp that our weakening economic position is undermining our long-term national power — not least our hard military power — and that there are actual new great powers on the horizon that we’re going to be dealing with in the coming decades. So pouring our national power and wealth down the drain to roust street gang jihadist in Basra just doesn’t turn out to be such a hot idea. But he has Iraq myopia and he’s McCain so he’s absolutely sure that if we stick with this it’ll get better and we may even eventually figure out a reason why we’re there in the first place.
