8-11-08, 1:35 pm

A new flyer posted at GutCheck reminds us of the various points of view on the Iraq war John McCain has held over the past few years.

Prior even to the launch of the Bush administration's publicity campaign to promote war with Iraq using misleading and false claims about Iraq's connection to Al Qaeda and its possession of nuclear and chemical weapons, John McCain supported war.

He was among the first voices to link Al Qaeda falsely to Iraq after the September 11th terrorist attacks and to try to distract a multinational effort to pursue Bin Laden and Al Qaeda (which didn't quite foreground US oil and economic interests enough, in the view of the Bush administration) and shift to what turned out to be a costly, single-minded obsession with Iraq.

After the passage of the congressional authorization for war on Iraq in 2002 and after Bush blatantly lied about Iraq's supposed pursuit of yellow cake in Niger during his 2003 state of the union speech, McCain urged public support for the war by pretending it would be easy.

'I think the victory will be rapid, within about three weeks,' McCain said on an MSNBC talk show.

Less than six month later, after the war had been ongoing for about three months, McCain hedged his bets. Responding to increasing public concern that the war would be much longer than he and the Bush administration predicted, McCain told his friends at FOX News, 'Well, then why was there a banner that said mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier? Look, the – I have said a long time that reconstruction of Iraq would be a long, long, difficult process, but the conflict – the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished, and it's very appropriate.'

As the insurgency grew and the conflict raged, McCain shifted again. In February 2004, McCain told Chris Matthews at MSNBC, 'We'll still be there for security purposes. Listen, my friend, we're going to be there for five or six years.'

In February 2005, in a CBS interview, John McCain flipped his past arguments again. He told CBS's Hannah Storm that he'd like to see US troops withdrawn 'tomorrow' but then added, 'But I think that if I had to guess, I would think that it's going to be at least another year to a year and a half.'

Then as the war continued and American voters booted the Republicans out of power in Congress in anger over what increasingly came to be seen as an unending occupation of Iraq, McCain added a new gem to his repertoire in an interview with NBC: 'We're either going to lose this thing or win this thing within the next several months.'

Then McCain decided he wanted to be president. His position on when the war might end slipped back into the irrationality that predominated the Bush administration. At a town hall meeting in January 2008, an attendee asked, 'President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years...' McCain jumped in, 'Maybe a hundred.'

More recently, after accusing people who favor a timetable for withdrawal as being in favor of 'losing in Iraq,' McCain appeared to agree with Barack Obama's call for a 16-month timetable to bring the troops home in an interview with CNN last month. '[I]t's a pretty good timetable,' McCain said, 'based on conditions on the ground. I think it's a pretty good timetable.'

According to the GutCheck flyer, John McCain's end dates for the Iraq war range from some time in early 2003 to sometime in 2108.

And if you're still not sure what McCain's position on Iraq is, he told some bikers in Missouri at a campaign stop last week that he wants to 'win [the war] the right way and that's by winning it.'

From displaying poor judgment on launching the invasion of Iraq, to being motivated by an ideological predisposition for military intervention, John McCain's verbal gymnastics reveal that he would do anything to fulfill his ambition for personal power.

Despite the flip-flopping, one thing is clear: John McCain favors an endless occupation of Iraq while our economy crumbles and our health care system lies in ruins. McCain wants desperately for the Iraq war to become his own, while, the people want it to end and want the $10 billion per month it costs to be brought home too.

--Joel Wendland can be reached at