John McCain Doesn’t Know What “The Surge” Is
Posted on July 24, 2008 - Filed Under American Politics, College |
This story has been running for a few days, but I didn’t blog about it because it’s kind of technical. It relates to events in Iraq over the past 2 years. Basically, McCain doesn’t know when ‘The Surge’ (an increase in troop levels, and the adoption of a new counter-insurgency strategy) began, even through he keeps trying to take most of the credit for it. In an interview with CBS he confused the ‘Anbar Awakening’, in which local leaders in Anbar province aligned with US forces against Al Qaeda, with the beginning of The Surge, even though this occurred months before The Surge was even announced, and almost a whole year before all the additional troops had been deployed. Furthermore, The Surge was largely concentrated in Baghdad and had little impact on troop levels in Anbar. Keith Olbermann explains the whole story here, with suitable indignation:
Given that McCain is generally said to have an advantage over Obama when it comes to foreign policy, this ignorance is pretty damning, especially when McCain keeps trying to pass off The Surge as somehow being his idea, even though he doesn’t know what it actually is.
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Other things McCain doesn’t know:
The difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
That Czechoslovakia hasn’t been a country in about 15 years.
That there is no border between Iraq and Pakistan (that would be Iran).
Yeah, I could have written a much bigger post if I’d chosen to dwell on all his recent gaffes. This particular one seems especially important however because there’s a substantive policy issue (The Surge) involved here, and because McCain hasn’t corrected his error, instead insisting that he’s right and everyone else is wrong.
Indeed. The phrase “dig up, stupid!” comes to mind. (John McCain is so old, he can remember when the Simpsons was good)