Johnny one note is at it again

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Arizona's Neoconservative Senator John McCain is at it again. This is the man who was a patron of Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress which fabricated intelligence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. This is the man who advocated for war with Iraq and confidently predicted before the war that the U.S. would “win easily”:

“Because I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women.” [CNN, 9/24/02]

“We’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. We may have to take out buildings, but we’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.” [CNN, 9/29/02]

“But the point is that, one, we will win this conflict. We will win it easily.” [MSNBC, 1/22/03]

h/t Think Progress

Friday, Senator John McCain predicted an allied win in Afghanistan in one year to 18 months if sufficient troops are sent. McCain predicts success in Afghanistan in 12-18 months

"I am absolutely convinced and totally confident that with sufficient resources we can turn the situation around," McCain told reporters at an international defense summit in easternmost Canada.

"I even am bold enough to predict that in a year to 18 months you will see success if the effort is sufficiently resourced and there is a commitment to get the job done before setting a date to leave the region," he said.

The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal has requested 40,000 more US troops for a broad counter-insurgency strategy to stabilize the country, i.e., a "surge."

U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl. W. Eikenberry, a retired three-star general who in 2006-2007 commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan, said that sending tens of thousands of additional American troops would increase the Afghan government's dependence on U.S. support at a time when its own security forces should be taking on more responsibility for fighting. "After a top-level meeting on the issue — Obama's eighth since early last month — the White House issued a statement that appeared to reflect Eikenberry's concerns. "The President believes that we need to make clear to the Afghan government that our commitment is not open-ended," the statement said." U.S. envoy resists troop increase, cites Karzai as problem

Throughout Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, the Republican nominee wrapped himself in the mantle of U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, proclaiming himself the leading advocate of the former commanding general in Iraq who devised last year’s controversial troop surge. Petraeus Talk Bolsters Obama « The Washington Independent In a speech before the conservative Heritage Foundation in October 2008, however, Gen. Petraeus had this to say:

Petraeus relinquished command in Iraq last month. He assumes responsibility for U.S. Central Command later this month, putting him in charge of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia.

* * *

Petraeus discussed whether his strategy in Iraq — protecting the population while cleaving apart the insurgency through reconciliation efforts to crush the remaining hard-core enemies — could also work in Afghanistan. The question has particular salience as Petraeus takes over U.S. Central Command, which will put him at the helm of all U.S. troops in the Middle East and South Asia, thereby giving him a large role in the Afghanistan war.

“Some of the concepts used in Iraq are transplantable [to Afghanistan] while others perhaps are not,” he said. “Every situation is unique.”

Petraeus pointed to efforts by Hamid Karzai’s government to negotiate a deal with the Taliban that would potentially bring some Taliban members back to power, saying that if they are “willing to reconcile,” it would be “a positive step.”

In saying that, Petraeus implicitly allied with U.S. Army Gen. David McKiernan, [then] the U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Last week, McKiernan rejected the idea of replicating the blend of counterinsurgency strategy employed in Iraq. “The word that I don’t use in Afghanistan is the word ’surge,’” McKiernan said, opting against recruiting Pashtun tribal fighters to supplement Afghan security forces against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. “There are countless other differences between Iraq and Afghanistan,” he added.

McCain, however, has argued that the Afghanistan war is ripe for a direct replication of Petraeus’ Iraq strategy of population-centric counterinsurgency. “Sen. Obama calls for more troops,” McCain said in the Sept. 26 debate, “but what he doesn’t understand, it’s got to be a new strategy, the same strategy that he condemned in Iraq. It’s going to have to be employed in Afghanistan.”

* * *

[Gen. Petraeus] never said terms like “victory” or “success” that McCain uses, and which the GOP nominee frequently chides Obama for avoiding.

During the 2008 presidential campaign Sen. McCain frequently cited his support for the "surge" in troops in Iraq as if this made him somehow a visionary or military genius (disregarding the lengthy list of times that McCain has been wrong about things he has said). But even Gen. Petraeus, who devised the "surge" strategy, did not agree with Sen. McCain's assessment of the success of the "surge."

Gen. David Petraeus, top commander of coalition military forces in Iraq, sat down with Newsweek to do a “valedictory” interview before taking up his new post as CENTCOM commander. Think Progress » Petraeus Disagrees With McCain, Says Success In Iraq Was Possible Without The Surge:

Newsweek reported that while Petraeus recognized that al-Qaeda in Iraq has been significantly diminished, he refused to say the terror group had been “defeated.” Moreover, Petraeus acknowledged that the recent successes in Iraq may have been possible without the surge:

Petraeus is careful not to credit all the progress to the surge of U.S. troops in 2007. The sea change came last year from a series of movements now known as the Awakening. […] So would the Sunni Awakening have succeeded without the surge? Possibly, he concedes.

Yet, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) disagrees with Petraeus, who McCain recently named as one of “the three wisest people” that he would rely heavily on as president. Last month during an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric, McCain dismissed the notion that security in Iraq may have improved without the so-called “surge” of U.S. forces there:

COURIC: Sen. Obama […] says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?

McCAIN: I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened.

Also last month, McCain declared outright that “we have succeeded in Iraq. We have succeeded.” Again, Petraeus cautioned against such rhetoric, Newsweek reported:

As the general’s counterinsurgency guidance puts it, under the rubric “Manage Expectations”: “Avoid premature declarations of success.” […] “The champagne bottle remains in the back of the refrigerator,” he says.

Neoconservatives have never met a war they didn't like. And when the war does not result in the "easy victory" they predict or goes badly, the Neoconservative response will always be to "send more troops." It is a rote response not grounded on the realities on the ground, nor military tactics, nor the strategic interests of the United States. It is simply a knee-jerk ideological response.

Johnny one note is at it again, singing the same old song.

NB: William E. Odom, a retired three-star General in the U.S. Army and former Director of the National Security Agency, wrote in Foreign Affairs When to Leave Iraq (July/August 2008):

The Awakening began in Anbar Province more than a year before the surge and took off in the summer and fall of 2006 in Ramadi and elsewhere, long before extra U.S. forces started flowing into Iraq in February and March of 2007. Throughout the war, enemy-of-my-enemy logic has driven Sunni decision-making. The Sunnis have seen three "occupiers" as threats: the United States, the Shiites (and their presumed Iranian patrons), and the foreigners and extremists in AQI. Crucial to the Awakening was the reordering of these threats.

* * *

This ordering of threats changed in 2005 and 2006. For one thing, U.S. forces became more effective and discriminating in their counterinsurgency activities.

* * *

As a result, U.S. forces came to be seen as less of a threat than either AQI or the Shiite militias — and the risk that U.S. forces would leave pushed the Sunnis to cut a deal to protect their interests while they still could.

The Iraq stategy was far more complex than John McCain's simplistic notion of "surge" more troops. Gen. Odom's analysis of the strategy in Iraq is well worth the read.