McCain, the Surge, and 'verb tenses'

God, this guy is simply embarrassing.

I can tell you that it [the Surge] is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it's succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr City are quiet."

--John McCain, Town Hall meeting, May 28, 2008.

The United States have not drawn down to pre-surge levels and are not expected to do so until the end of the year, and even that's being highly optimistic.

Nor is the city of Mosul "quiet".

Moreover, McCain's claim that Mosul is "quiet" was disproved earlier today in grim fashion. Three suicide bombings -- two in Mosul and another in a surrounding town -- left 30 Iraqis dead and more than two dozen injured, according to press reports.

It really is an indication of the difficulty that the entire McCain campaign faces, pinning it's success to the coat tails of a highly unpopular war, and trying to sell that war as a success to a public who have long given up on believing in it.

But it's the defence mustered by the McCain camp, when caught out telling obvious untruths, that I find so interesting.

In a conference call with reporters, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann said the issue was a "question of semantics," and that McCain would have been right if he had said that the Pentagon had "taken a decision" to draw down the troops or was in the process of drawing them down.

Taking a decision and implementing it are entirely different things, and McCain is giving us a further example of how much he is promising a third Bush term when he makes such an argument. Scott McLellan has told us just this week how Bush believes that a decision, once made, is always correct. McCain appears to be employing a similar logic here. He thinks that if a decision has been made to reduce the troops to a pre-surge level then that must be a sign of success. The decision alone is a sign of success, rather than the implementation of that decision.

Scheunemann was clearly irritated by what he considered to be "the nitpicking" of senatorial grammar. "If you're going to start fact-checking verb tenses," he admonished me, "we're going to make sure we start monitoring verb tenses a lot more closely than we have in this campaign."

This is simply bizarre and is reminiscent of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" sign. You can't define success based on what you expect to do in the future. Success is when you have done it. Before that, it's simply a wish list.

McCain insists that he did not make a mistake, in verb tenses or any other way. "I said we had drawn down," he told reporters today. "I said we have drawn down and we have drawn down three of the five brigades. We have drawn down three of the five brigades. We have drawn down the marines. The rest will be home the end of July. That's just facts, the facts as I stated them."

Those are not the facts as he stated them. In fact, I'll go further and say that this last statement of McCain's is a bald lie.

He did not say that "we had drawn down." If he had said so he would have perhaps have had a point. What he said was "we have drawn down to pre-surge levels."

That is simply untrue. And McCain has no-one to blame for that but himself. It's not a case of the Obama team "nitpicking", it's a case of McCain attempting to oversell an unpopular war.

And yet, bizarrely, that's the issue that McCain has chosen to fight this campaign on.

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Tags: John McCain, Barack Obama, US election 2008, Iraq war, surge levels