McCain must explain U.S. 100-year vigil in Iraq

This is an excellent political commentary from The National Journal's Ronald Brownstein. In the big fight over the Republican complaint that the Democrats new television add had distorted GOP presidential candidate, Senator John McCain's statement of a possible 100-year U.S. presence in Iraq. McCain continues to insist that the statement did not mean that U.S. troops would be in combat for 100 years, but rather as a long-term military presence similar to U.S. military presence in South Korea, Japan and Germany. Brownstein argues that the problem for McCain and the Republicans is in their inability to explain how the current U.S. war in Iraq can be transformed into a U.S. military presence found in these three democratic nations. According to Brownstein:

First, if McCain doesn't envision a 100-year American front-line combat presence in Iraq, how long is he willing to keep U.S. forces in that role? So far, all he has said is that the United States should withdraw only if it concludes that the Iraq mission is unachievable or when it has achieved success, which he defines as the establishment of "a peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state."

McCain hasn't said how long he would keep fighting to reach that demanding goal. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of McCain's closest Senate allies, recently said he thinks that McCain would maintain current U.S. troop levels in Iraq through his entire four-year presidential term if military commanders recommended that course to maintain stability there.

McCain has not said when, but he has pledged that Iraqi units will eventually assume the major combat responsibility. That prompts the next question McCain should address: What would then become the mission for the U.S. forces he wants to maintain in Iraq? McCain hasn't specified. But he has suggested that their job would be to deter external aggression, much as in South Korea where our troops "served as a buffer against invasion from North Korea."

In that example, however, the U.S. and South Korea agreed that North Korea posed a threat. The American troop presence in Germany and Japan long rested on a similar agreement about the potential danger from the Soviet Union, notes Ivo Daalder, a Brookings Institution senior fellow in foreign policy.

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Indeed, skeptics raise another question that fundamentally challenges McCain's analogy to Germany, Japan, and South Korea: Could U.S. troops ever be accepted in Iraq as completely as they have been in those societies? Or would our forces always be a target in Iraq, not only for Al Qaeda but also for the contending domestic factions? As Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean asked this week, "Does anyone think ... if you keep our troops in Iraq for a hundred years, people won't be ... setting off suicide bombs?"

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Five years ago this week, President Bush exulted beneath a banner that declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. McCain, under any interpretation of his words, is proposing another mission in Iraq--a long vigil--that would extend for decades. With the stakes so high, it's not enough for him to accuse critics of twisting his meaning: He needs to more clearly explain it himself.

You can bet that John McCain will never attempt to clearly explain his own policy of continuing the U.S. war in Iraq.