What if one presidential candidate’s position on the most important issue at stake in the election was based on an incorrect premise—but the media didn’t call him on it?
There’s a case to be made that that’s what happening in regard to John McCain’s position on Iraq.
As The Washington Post summed it up Friday:
McCain thinks that the U.S. cannot leave until Al Qaeda is defeated and Iraqi forces have been trained to maintain order.
(The Post’s take largely jibes with the position expressed on McCain’s Web site.)
But according to several experts, Al Qaeda is responsible for only a small, and diminishing, percentage of the remaining violence in Iraq. Steven Metz, a professor of National Security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, says he believes that the number of attacks carried out by Al Qaeda, or by the home-grown terrorist group calling itself Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), was always a fairly low percentage of the total violence, and is currently lower than it’s been in years.
Thomas Ricks, who spent five tours in Iraq as a military correspondent for The Washington Post, agreed. In an e-mail sent before leaving once more for Baghdad, Ricks wrote that “surprisingly little” of the ongoing violence was being committed by AQI.
And another source, a former intelligence officer with the Defense Department and an expert on Iraq, said flatly: “A tiny, tiny minority of the violence is AQI.” U.S. military operations in Anbar province severely affected the group’s ability to launch attacks, said the source. Today, “most of the violence is intra-Shia stuff in Baghdad and the south.”
It’s also worth noting that, according to most experts, AQI’s ties to Al Qaeda proper are unclear at best.
So an Iraq policy like McCain’s, whose central premise is that we need to stay there until Al Qaeda is defeated, would appear to be seriously flawed. After all, we seem not far from being able to declare victory against AQI, but Iraq is far from stable. But, perhaps because of McCain’s presumed expertise and experience on national security issues, the press, by and large, hasn’t seen fit to point out this obvious problem.
It’s clear why McCain frames the issue in this way. By suggesting that the enemy we’re fighting in Iraq is Al Qaeda, the group that attacked us on 9/11, he hopes to maintain a minimum of popular support for the ongoing conflict. But it’s the press’s job to set the record straight.
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.