Foes target McCain's 100-year war remark

Republican says rivals twist Iraq comment

Almost daily, Democrats hammer John McCain for supporting a 100-year war in Iraq, putting their spin on McCain's answer months ago to a voter in New Hampshire to draw the starkest distinction possible on one of the defining issues of this year's presidential election.

The presumptive Republican nominee says that his Democratic rivals are distorting his views. He explains that he never favored such a long war, but rather envisioned an open-ended military presence of peacekeepers, similar to US military commitments in Korea and Bosnia and even Japan and Germany.

But some academic and political analysts say McCain's argument fails to distinguish between other US occupations and an extended presence in a disputed, volatile flashpoint.

One historian who opposes the war said yesterday that the Arizona senator's analogy has no true precedent in those earlier conflicts.

"Were the US to succeed militarily in Iraq, yes, US forces will remain in Iraq for decades to come," said Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations and US history and retired Army colonel whose son, an Army soldier, was killed last year by a suicide bomb there. "My difference with McCain is I don't think we will prevail militarily in Iraq."

McCain's 100-year remark, initially made Jan. 3 at a town hall-style meeting in Derry before the New Hampshire primary, has taken on a life of its own. Several videos of it on YouTube are circulating among antiwar and Democratic groups.

In recent days, the comment has sparked some of the campaign's most heated exchanges between McCain and Democrat Barack Obama.

While McCain and Republicans say that Obama is trying to "swindle voters" with "dishonest smears" by repeating the remark, the Illinois senator remains undeterred.

"Senator McCain has been saying I don't understand national security, but he's the one who wants to keep tens of thousands of United States troops in Iraq for as long as 100 years," he told reporters yesterday in Pennsylvania.

Danny Hayes, a Syracuse University political science professor who specializes in political communication, said the Democrats' pounding on the subject could hurt McCain "to the extent that this remark or similar remarks feed into a larger picture of McCain as having a more aggressive foreign policy, or one that may tie him more closely to the Bush administration than perhaps he would like."

Polls consistently show a majority of voters support the US military leaving Iraq sooner rather than later, and most voters will "interpret these things they hear in the news in a way that fits with what they already believe," Hayes said yesterday. More likely to be influenced, he said, is the smaller group of voters "whose attitudes are less stable toward McCain or Iraq."

Hayes drew a parallel between McCain's 100-year remark and the comment that stuck to Senator John F. Kerry during his unsuccessful run as Democratic presidential nominee in 2004. Explaining in shorthand the complexities of two different versions of an appropriations bill to support the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kerry famously remarked: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

Kerry later called it "one of those inarticulate moments," but Republicans used the comment in television ads and repeated it relentlessly through the fall campaign, cementing an image of Kerry as a flip-flopper.

Four years later, the Democrats are trying to return the favor.

McCain is reminded of his remark constantly by the Democrats - if not by presidential candidates Obama and Hillary Clinton, then by Democratic national chairman Howard Dean or the national party's press operation.

McCain, his partisans, and the Republican National Committee have repeatedly fired back, saying McCain's remarks have been twisted and citing independent analyses that say Democrats are distorting what he said. They have also pointed out what they describe as inconsistencies in the Democrats' positions about what they would do in Iraq. McCain, himself, pointedly questioned Obama's readiness to be commander-in-chief, telling reporters this week that the Illinois senator "does not understand . . . the fundamental elements of national security and warfare."

Late yesterday, amid the latest exchange between the McCain and Obama campaigns, the Democratic National Committee issued a compendium of McCain quotes about Iraq over the past five years as evidence of what it called the Republican's "full-steam ahead" approach to the conflict. A printout of the e-mail runs to nine pages, and in a statement attached to the list, a DNC spokeswoman said:

"John McCain owes it to the American people to make his true intentions about the war in Iraq known, so they can judge for themselves whether they want our next president to have our troops sitting in permanent bases in Iraq for the next century."

Bacevich asserted that McCain's comment "was perhaps too flippant a remark to reflect his level of determination" to see the Iraq conflict through to a successful conclusion, in comparison to his Democratic opponents who consider the war a mistake and a failure and pledge a phased withdrawal of all American combat troops.

Bacevich, however, said it is unfair to cite McCain's comments as evidence "he intends to fight in Iraq for 100 years." McCain specifically supported a military presence to suppress Islamic terrorism "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."

McCain was "acknowledging that the history of US military policy since World War II has more often than not produced a long-lasting military presence and involvement in whatever happens to have been a theater of war," said Bacevich, who has written or edited several books about US diplomatic and military policy.

But he took issue with McCain's comparisons to World War II, which he called total conventional war; Korea, which he said was limited conventional war; and Bosnia, which he described as "a police action to preside over the disintegration of Yugoslavia into several component parts, a process which is still ongoing with the independence of Kosovo."

Iraq is fundamentally different, he said.

"As devastated as Germany and Japan were in 1945, there really still was an identifiable German nation-state and an identifiable Japanese nation-state. So there was something to build upon," Bacevich said.

"In Iraq, it's not even clear there is a nation-state, and there's little evidence there is an effective Iraqi government," he said. "That tends to suggest a long-term presence in Iraq will not be a peacekeeping one but one in which we're engaged in a very, very long, ugly unconventional war."