9-11-08, 1:30 pm

We know how George W. Bush lied to the American people about the case for launching an invasion and now nearly 6-year long occupation of Iraq. Millions of Americans cringed when he insisted that Iraq sought to build nuclear and chemical weapons. Many us were taken back to that deadly, tragic day in 2001 when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney repeated the falsehood that Saddam Hussein supported Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.

But millions also became outraged when we discovered all of this to be lies. Evidence for both the WMD claims and the Al-Qaeda links was fabricated, we learned. We also learned that many in the intelligence community knew these things to be untrue.

The Bush administration tapped into our fears and outrage about the September 11th attacks to promote a war in a country that had nothing to do with those attacks. The Bush administration lied in order to beat the drums for a war that has cost over 4,200 American lives, well over 30,000 wounded, and hundreds of thousands, even millions of Iraqis, killed, injured, or displaced.

No one was a greater purveyor of that lie, however, than John McCain.

He now likes to claim he was a critic of George W. Bush and a 'maverick.' But as he himself said as he pursued his personal ambition for the Republican nomination, 'on the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I have been totally in agreement and support of President Bush.'

In 2003, John McCain promoted Bush's war agenda. Indeed, as early as November 2001, McCain wanted war on Iraq, but it wasn't until the Bush administration had gotten the right handles on the public imagination with its campaign of fear, invoking 'mushroom clouds' and talking about imaginary meetings between Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government, that John McCain's efforts would serve the administration's direct interest.

In an op-ed for USA Today in February of 2003, just three weeks after the Bush administration knowingly lied about supposed Iraqi attempts to buy 'yellow cake' from Niger, a claim US intelligence officials repeatedly tried to remove from the infamous State of the Union speech, McCain repeated Dick Cheney's lie that Saddam Hussein was operationally tied to Al-Qaeda.

'Sept. 11, 2001 showed that Al-Qaeda is a grave threat. Saddam Hussein has the ability to make a far worse day of infamy by turning Iraq into a weapons assembly line for Al-Qaeda's network,' McCain wrote.

But he didn't stop there. Pretending that he thought 'war is horrible,' McCain went on. 'But the past century and 9/11 have taught us that there are things worse than war: accommodating international criminals implacably hostile to our interests and values,' he said. Do you see it? The 9/11 attacks are good enough reason in his mind to attack a country that was not involved in those attacks.

'Failing to act' – not against Al-Qaeda, but against a country that wasn't involved – 'to prevent another attack could make one inevitable,' McCain continued with the twisted logic of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

Later that same year, before Iraq became a political liability for the Bush administration, John McCain would tell an audience that Iraq was the central front in the war on terror, a Bush administration talking point, and that 'we could muddle through in Afghanistan.' In other words, he said, those responsible for 9/11 were not and should not be the real targets of Bush's war on terror.

McCain was not content in his USA Today piece, however, to justify war with a country that was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. He perpetuated a second lie. 'Who would not have attacked Al-Qaeda before 9/11 had we known their plans?', he wondered. What he didn't want to remind Americans about was that fact that the CIA had prepared 10 briefings between April 20 and August 6, 2001 for George W. Bush personally which identified intelligence pointing to Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden preparing a major attack.

McCain may not have been as privy to the exact nature of the Bush administration's main foreign policy objective when it came into office as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was. In a CBS News interview, O'Neill said that from day one, promoting regime change in Iraq was the number one foreign policy goal of the Bush administration. If anyone in the administration questioned that, they were ostracized from the inner sanctum or treated as disloyal. Given this self-imposed bubble, why would Bush focus on a substantially less significant figure, in his mind, like Osama Bin Laden?

What McCain defended, along with Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, was the notion that the US had the right to attack any country for any reason. O'Neill put it thus: “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.” And O'Neill soon left the administration. Now that's a maverick.

If John McCain really thought war was horrible, he would have resisted the idea of launching a war against a country that had not attacked us. If he really believed war was horrible, he would have demanded to see the evidence that Dick Cheney and George W. Bush used to justify the war. If he were a maverick who believed war was horrible, he would have worked not to justify a war based on lies or to cover up the truth with Bush administration talking points.

If John McCain had really put our country and the men and women who would be asked to go to Iraq first, he would have believed and acted upon the basic notion that US troops should only be sent into harm's way in defense of our country, not into an offensive, ill-conceived war, that was ill-planned, and with no strategy for bringing the war to an end.

Now as McCain travels the country again attempting to use the deaths of the victims of the September 11th attacks for political gain, voters are realizing that if McCain becomes the US president, we can expect more of the same: lies and endless war.

--Reach Joel Wendland at