McCain claims "I know what [Iraqis] want." Does he? What makes him an expert on Iraqi thinking?

Question

Considering that Bush was recently forced to capitulate and include a time horizon (eg: timetable) for US forces to withdraw in the Iraq/US security agreement.

Considering that several Iraqi govt. officials, including PM al-Maliki with the backing of the Iraqi Parliament, have recently stated they want US forces out by 2010, which agrees with Obama's withdrawl plan.

And is McCain going to pull this kind of BS with Americans, if he is elected President?

I guarantee that he doesn't know what I want, and I don't need an Uncle McCain nanny-state telling me how to live my life.

Isn't his hubris counterproductive to what America needs right now? Especially after 8 years of Bush's "cowboy" (all hat and no cattle) diplomacy?

Answer 1

Please don't doubt the Trigger Happy Pappy's 'experience'!

After all, he is on his second wife, and has crashed three planes. And senility is on the way.

What more do you want or need?

Answer 2

There's his long standing record which makes him an expert.

"Saddam Hussein [is] developing weapons of mass destruction as quickly as he can," he informed Fox News in November 2001. By February 2003, McCain had upgraded Hussein's capabilities and was warning Americans that "Hussein has the ability to ... [turn] Iraq into a weapons assembly line for Al Qaeda's network."

Well, no. But never mind that. We won't hold McCain responsible for the Bush administration's cooking of the intelligence books.

So how'd McCain do on his other Iraq-related predictions?

On the Cheney/Rumsfeld Delusional Thinking Index, McCain scores a perfect 10 out of 10. "I believe that the success will be fairly easy," he assured CNN's Larry King in September 2002.

Quagmire? Insurgency? Naah. "We're not going to get into house-to-house fighting," he scoffed to Wolf Blitzer in 2002. "We're not going to have a bloodletting." In fact, by March 2003, McCain was positively giddy with Rumsfeldian enthusiasm: "There's no doubt in my mind ... we will be welcomed as liberators."

When it came to predicting the sectarian conflicts that have wracked Iraq since we "liberated" it, McCain was equally off target. "There's not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias," he explained confidently on MSNBC in April 2003, "so I think they can probably get along."

McCain's had five long years since then to reflect on just how well Sunni and Shiite groups are getting along, but he's still having a tough time keeping the whole thing straight. In Jordan this past March, he pronounced it "common knowledge ... that Al Qaeda" -- a Sunni-dominated group -- "is going back into Iran" -- a country led by hard-line Shiites -- "and receiving training ... from Iran." Oops ... no! Joe Lieberman, McCain's new Mini-Me, whispered a correction in his ear, presumably explaining that the Iranian Shiites hate Sunni-dominated Al Qaeda and wouldn't help the group if their lives depended on it.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-o...

McCain's experience in foreign policy is experience at being wrong. Some expert allright