Ackerman’s either/or is apt. One wants to give McCain the benefit of the doubt here, but it’s hard even to know what that would be. The kindest scenario is that McCain was suffering from faulty memory—or that he was just, à la Hillary Clinton and her Boznia recollections, fatigued. But one wonders: could his comment, like his Sunni/Shi’a confusion earlier, have belied a fundamental misconception of the timeline of recent events in Iraq? Was McCain revealing miseducation about the surge, or the Awakening, or both?
I don’t know. Because, so far as I’ve seen, no one in the MSM has asked.
And that’s, perhaps, what’s most disturbing in all of this: the silence on the matter from the MSM. It started with CBS itself, which didn’t air the footage of McCain’s mistake in its prime-time news hour; it edited that part out. In a statement emailed to Politico, spokesperson Jennifer Farley defended CBS’s actions:
As all news organizations do with extended interviews, last night’s Obama and McCain interviews were edited to fit the available time and to give viewers a fair expression of the candidates’ major differences. The full transcript and video were and still are available at cbsnews.com.
They are. Yet Couric’s question was left intact in the primetime version; CBS edited in a different response to the same question. Which is, put as charitably as possible, misleading to audiences.
But this is bigger than CBS. Now that Ackerman and other bloggers—Andrew Sullivan, Political Animal’s Kevin Drum, Politico’s Ben Smith, The Huffington Post’s Seth Colter Walls—have shed light on McCain’s mistake, where’s the MSM follow-up? Where are the “Breaking News” announcements on cable, the updates on newspaper Web sites? Keith Olbermann aired a segment about the matter on last night’s Countdown…but where’s the commentary from the nonpartisan newspeople? The AP briefly mentioned it in a short piece about Obama’s and McCain’s back-and-forth on Iraq; but it buried it in the sixth graf of a story whose lede was, “Republican presidential candidate John McCain says Democrat Barack Obama is wrong about the Iraq war”—and which ended with McCain’s quote about Obama’s stance on the war: “He was wrong then, he is wrong now.”
But don’t voters deserve more than he said/he said stenography here? Shouldn’t the press be looking more deeply into McCain’s statement? This wasn’t a minor gaffe, after all. It was a fundamental, factual error about the surge—which is, politically speaking, McCain’s baby. This isn’t forgetting your kid’s birthday; it’s forgetting how old he is in the first place.
In his interview with Couric yesterday, McCain declared of Obama’s take on the surge, “I don’t know how you respond to something that is…such a false depiction of what actually happened.”
I’d direct that back to McCain. And I’d argue that the best way for us to respond to McCain’s own false depiction is to, you know, ask him about it. We owe it to ourselves—and to Iraqis—to do so. McCain might well become our president. His understanding of the situation in Iraq might well, come January 20, be determining American policy in that country. So why would he misspeak about it? Why would he err about the surge? And why isn’t our press doing more to find out?
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Mrs. Garber, Not that I would usually want to interrupt a “journalist”, especially one caught up in another bullshit nutroot echochamber lynching of John McCain, but lets see what one of the architects of the 2007 surge, Fred Kagan, said about this almost a year ago.
The tribal leaders in Anbar began to turn against al Qaeda in Iraq last year, largely due to unspeakable atrocities committed by the terrorists against their own hosts. Many analysts and observers have seized upon this fact to argue that the movement in Anbar had nothing to do with the surge, began before the surge did, and would continue even without the surge. This argument is invalid. Anbari tribal leaders did begin to turn against AQI in their areas last year before the surge began, but not before Colonel Sean MacFarland began to apply in Ramadi the tactics and techniques that are the basis of the current strategy in Baghdad. His soldiers and Marines fought tenaciously to establish a foothold in Anbar’s capital, which was then a terrorist stronghold, and thereby demonstrated to the local leaders that they could count on American support as they began to fight their erstwhile allies. Even so, the movement proceeded slowly and fitfully for most of 2006 and, indeed, into 2007. But when Colonel John Charlton’s brigade relieved MacFarland’s in Ramadi and was joined by two additional Marine battalions (part of the surge) elsewhere in Anbar, the “awakening” began to accelerate very rapidly. At the start of 2007 there were only a handful of Anbaris in the local security forces. By the summer there were over 14,000. Before the surge, Ramadi was one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq; now it is possible for Americans to walk through its market with limited security details and without body armor. David Kilcullen describes the relationship between the surge and the movement very well in his Small Wars Journal posting, and I have also addressed the issue in detail in a recent Weekly Standard article . The fact is that neither the surge nor the turn of the tribal leaders would in itself have been enough to turn Anbar around — both were necessary, and will remain so for some time.
Here’s a tip, next time you run to your keyboard with a “hot” story that you read while surfing the Huffington Post, TPM or Media Matters, maybe you should step back, do some research and say “do I want to sound like as much of a retard as these people?”.
Posted by TDC on Wed 23 Jul 2008 at 08:12 PM
Because an architect of the surge is a great, unbiased source to get your facts from. Seriously, I'm tired of fools like you trying to obscure reality of the situation. I suggest you do some research on Capt Travis L Patriquin before you speak another word of bull about the Anbar Awakening.
Posted by pseizure2000 on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 11:06 AM
TDC:
I'm not clear on your objection to the article. McCain claimed that the surge "began the Anbar awakening." That's clearly not true, even according to Kagan. In fact, Kagan notes in the article you reference that:
The change in U.S. strategy announced in January 2007 and the surge of forces over the ensuing months did not create this shift in Anbar, but accelerated its development.
(The article from The Weekly Standard is here.)
Has Kagan ever claimed that the surge was justified by the Anbar awakening? I always thought it was just a fortuitous confluence of events, but my memory of the official justifications for the surge are fuzzy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the awakening was cited as a reason the surge was necessary/would be successful. This would reverse the causality chain of McCain's comments completely.
Anon
Posted by Anon on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 11:13 AM
Anon, helping the Sunnis in Anbar was an orginal, if secondary, objective of the surge. As Bush's State of the Union address in 2007 put it:
In order to make progress toward this goal, the Iraqi government must stop the sectarian violence in its capital. But the Iraqis are not yet ready to do this on their own. So we're deploying reinforcements of more than 20,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Iraq. The vast majority will go to Baghdad, where they will help Iraqi forces to clear and secure neighborhoods, and serve as advisers embedded in Iraqi Army units. With Iraqis in the lead, our forces will help secure the city by chasing down the terrorists, insurgents, and the roaming death squads. And in Anbar Province, where al Qaeda terrorists have gathered and local forces have begun showing a willingness to fight them, we're sending an additional 4,000 United States Marines, with orders to find the terrorists and clear them out. (Applause.) We didn't drive al Qaeda out of their safe haven in Afghanistan only to let them set up a new safe haven in a free Iraq.
Neither this, nor Kagan's remarks as quoted by TDC, support McCain's statement that "it began the Anbar awakening." At best, Republicans can chalk it up to another "he knew what he was trying to say, honest he did" moment that's not quite as utterly embarrassing as the "al Qaeda training in Iran" moment.
The assertion that the Anbar awakening would have progressed as far as it did without the surge is very questionable. Regardless, beating the Sunnis in Anbar over the head with "you couldn't have done it without us" seems like a clumsy move to score American election points at the cost of winning the war in Iraq.
Posted by nate on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 11:54 AM
You make a good point, TDC—or Fred Kagan does, anyway, in the selection you’ve quoted. (If readers are interested in checking it out, the excerpt TDC has quoted comes from a September 3, 2007 essay in The National Review, here.)
Sure, TDC, you can say that the Anbar Awakening didn’t truly pick up momentum until later in its existence—and even that the Awakening and the surge were symbiotic. But that’s changing the subject. At issue here is the start of the Anbar Awakening, not its efficacy; the issue is chronology, and—in this context, at least—nothing more nuanced than that. And the Awakening started, as a movement, in the summer and fall of 2006. Which is, as I’ve noted above, well documented.
McCain seemed to think that it started after the surge began in 2007. That’s a problem.
Now, McCain might well have had Kagan’s more nuanced take on the Awakening—namely, that it didn’t pick up force until 2007, and that that was due in part to the buildup of American forces—in his mind when talking to Couric. I sincerely hope he did; I sincerely want to believe that a man who (let’s leave aside the polls) has a 50/50 shot at becoming our next Commander in Chief understands in great detail the situation on the ground in Iraq.
But the fact remains that, whatever was in McCain’s mind at the time, what he said to Couric was factually wrong. And if his words were indicative of a more nuanced interpretation of the Awakening/surge relationship, he didn’t indicate that to Couric: he said, rather, that the surge created the Awakening—which, even in Kagan’s portrayal of events, is simply not true. Nor—and, as I said, here’s my main problem, the lack of MSM follow-up—did Couric question McCain about his comment and give him the chance to explain his reasoning in more detail. It’s an explanation I would have been keenly interested in hearing.
Now, I’m happy to see, two days after the fact, the MSM are doing what I hoped they would: questioning McCain about his statement. And here’s what he’s said about it, per the AP:
“He told reporters during an unscheduled stop in a supermarket that what the Bush administration calls ‘the surge’ was actually ‘made up of a number of components,’ some of which began before the president's order for more troops.”
In other words, TDC, McCain isn’t adopting Kagan’s (and, apparently, your) interpretation of a late-starting Awakening to explain his chronological error…but rather an interpretation of the surge that would suggest an early beginning. Which is a different point entirely.
And McCain goes on to say that we’re using the wrong definition of the term “surge”:
"A surge,” he told reporters during that same avail, “is really a counterinsurgency made up of a number of components. ... I'm not sure people understand that 'surge' is part of a counterinsurgency."
In other words, he’s trying to adopt a broader definition of the “surge”—not just the commonly accepted definition, per Newser, emphasis mine, as “a phrase commonly used to describe U.S. President George W. Bush's plan to increase the number of American troops deployed to the Iraq War to provide security to Baghdad and Al Anbar Province…that resulted in Iraqi-led initiative to secure Baghdad starting in February 2007”—but as, more generally, a “counterinsurgency.”
I don’t find McCain’s re-definition convincing; in fact, I find its glibness rather disturbing. You, I suspect, will disagree. But we don’t need to get into Defining the Surge in our comments section. The point I was making above was that the MSM needs to be following up on McCain’s errors—not only to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his knowledge of Iraq, but also because voters deserve to know, in detail, about his understanding of the situation there. I’m glad they did follow up, if belatedly, in this case, and hope we’ll see much more of that type of questioning—for both candidates—between now and November.
Posted by Megan Garber on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 12:29 PM
Megan, I would disagree with your last point and say that we should get into "defining the surge", since its definition seems to be shifting a great deal within the media as this story evolves.
I've held the cynical view since its first suggestion in early 07 that the Surge was little more than a calculated move by Bush and, yes, McCain to inoculate a continuation of the Iraqi occupation against criticism from Democrats and the left by cloaking it with the unassailable character of the troops on the ground and their highly esteemed commanders.
One need not share this suspicion to see how conveniently this has played out for McCain over a year later. Media commentators, eager to conclude the surge narrative with some kind of concrete success or failure, have accepted as gospel that the surge worked. Not once have I seen this simplistic notion questioned, defended, or fleshed out with any thorough analysis; commentators merely start from the assumption that the surge has succeeded and continue to make their points from there. Moreover, the grounds of contention appear to have been fully ceded by the Democrats, offering little promise that this concept will ever been considered for debate again.
Obama has been grudgingly complicit in this lately, as he offers what appears to be lip service to the success of the surge, but it's telling that his attempt to inject the slightest bit of nuance into the story - that the Sunni Awakening alone might be partially responsible for some of the security gains - threw the McCain camp into such hysterics. A deeper examination of who can claim what responsibility, McCain undoubtedly fears, will do nothing except cast light on the fragile security situation in Baghdad and Anbar, to say nothing of the paltry political gains made during the Surge's duration.
I wonder what can be done to put the issue of dissecting the surge's true successes back on the media's operating table. I suppose it took McCain's overzealousness in attempting to rewrite simple history to make it even a remote possibility.
Posted by Evan Woodward on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 04:13 PM
Here's a tip, TDC, written apparently for yourself:
... maybe you should step back, do some research and say “do I want to sound like as much of a retard as these people?”
Posted by circusboy on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 10:50 PM