True, as far as it goes. But there is another truth here, and it is less of a problem for McCain than a strategy. McCain repeats this refrain not simply because it is what he believes -- that a permanent presence in Iraq does not matter so long as casualties are limited (who decides what is an acceptable level of casualties is another issue) -- but also because each time he repeats this he and the media reinforce the underlying premise of his permanent presence statements, that the Surge has been successful. Moreover, given McCain's status as the most vocal supporter of the Surge outside of the White House, the media lends credibility to McCain whenever the media speaks of the Surge's success and, accordingly, lends credibility to McCain's viewpoint on where to proceed from here. All of you Democrats believed the Surge was a mistake, he is saying, but I, John McCain, stood by my mavericky principles and bucked the common wisdom on the Surge and, look, I got it right and you were wrong, so you should listen to me now. (Of course this also ignores that the concept of the necessity for an increase in troop levels -- what is commonly thought of as the surge -- was an important part of a Demorcratic strategy, most often voiced by Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign, but with the goal of not a permanent presence but rather an opportunity to draw down and extract our troops from Iraq.)
So, no matter how ridiculous McCain's statements implying a permanent presence, it's exactly what McCain wants to convey -- he'll tell it like it is, and his confidence in stating that, just like Cheney's calm confidence in every foolish and dangerous thing that Cheney has said, is very convincing to the legions who are not focused on the details.
That being said, however, a fundamental issue to me rests on why the media, from the propagandistic Fox News (OK, we know their reasons) to Charlie Gibson to Matt Lauer to Andy Sullivan, feels the need to identify the Surge as the source of success on the ground in Iraq. It is, I think, a cum hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, as correlation does not imply causation. I don't think anyone can prove a specific cause for the improvement of conditions on the ground (for sake of this argument, I am willing to accept the presumption that conditions have indeed improved on the ground in Iraq, although again I don't know enough about those conditions to truly opine on them; and, again, conditions on the ground are not the whole story -- a key issue is political stabilization). There are many dynamics at play in Iraq that impact an improving security situation. But the news media has effectively ceded the idea that the so-called Surge -- a boosting of troop levels under the brilliant guidance of General Petraeus -- is a successful strategy (although I would argue that it is not even really a strategy), and that it is the cause of improved security; as a result, McCain's basic premise goes undisputed, giving McCain the opportunity to say, as he did to Matt Lauer, that "anyone who knows the facts on the ground say that" the Surge has been a success.
What the media fail to point out in these situations is that there are indeed other facts on the ground beyond the Surge.
As Philip Carter pointed out following the presentation to Congress in April by Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker:
[Petraeus and Crocker] also overplayed the surge's success -- downplaying or discounting factors that likely did more to create today's improved security conditions. While their "Anaconda" strategy looks cool on a PowerPoint slide, it confuses the issues of control and influence, putting too much stock in America's ability to engineer success in Iraq. And, perhaps most tellingly, the two men made the case for perseverance without placing Iraq in the context of vital U.S. national interests, offering only apocalyptic predictions of what would happen if we don't stay the course.Matt Yglesias and others have come back to this point on several occasions, that much of the success of the Surge is due to the fact that we negotiated with -- flipped -- the insurgents. That is, we negotiated with our enemies. This is no small detail, and not really part of the Surge as it is commonly portrayed. In fact, it is a policy that McCain would, if proposed by the Obama camp, call "appeasement," but which appears to have been fundamental to success on the ground in Iraq. It appears that much of the success on the ground is at least party the result of a "liberal" policy of negotiation, a policy that McCain publicly rejects.
I would also note that Matt also points out the area in which the Surge has truly been successful -- from a press management perspective.
Now, it may be that the wiser approach is to ignore the entire argument above. That is, by arguing that the Surge is not the sole cause of some form of success in Iraq (to the extent that making the consequences of a grand mistake more manageable constitutes success), it takes attention away from the more important issue of what to do going forward -- to either use the "success on the ground" as the opportunity to pull the troops out, or to dig our heels in because we must stay the course on the current strategy. And, there is certainly the concern that the Republicans would use any argument that the Surge itself is not really successful to attack the Democrats as anti-American, against the troops, and blind partisans. I would expect nothing less.
But our press does not need to be party to this argument. Maybe the simplistic narrative doesn't allow them to simply state that, for a number of reasons, which we cannot identify with specificity, but which coincide with the Surge and various efforts to negotiate with insurgent groups, among other things, violence on the ground in Iraq appears to have declined from prior levels. Maybe they need to jump the gun, to tell us that the Patriots and Big Brown cannot lose, rather than maintain an honest skepticism and seek answers to difficult questions.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that so long as McCain continues to get the benefit of the doubt about his judgment on the Surge, he will continue to get the benefit of the doubt on how to handle the so-called improved security situation going forward. And if the spin is that the success of the Surge proves that we need to maintain heightened troop levels in Iraq, then we never leave.
That's where McCain inevitably and expressly takes us so long as the conversation remains fixed where it is today.
