Yesterday on Fox News’ Hannity and Colmes, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) claimed that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) never said that the Iraq war would be won easily:
He has never said that this war would be easy. He has been the guy saying for four years that we’re getting it wrong. We need more troops.
Watch it:
Graham’s statement is absolutely false. In the run-up to war, McCain eagerly proclaimed on multiple occasions that the war would be “easy,” giving rosy predictions about the daunting war ahead:
“Because I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women.”" [CNN, 9/24/02]
“But the point is that, one, we will win this conflict. We will win it easily.” [MSNBC, 1/22/03]
When Alan Colmes countered Graham’s statement with a barrage of similar quotes from McCain, Graham responded: “He said that beating the Saddam Hussein regime militarily was quick and it was lethal,” implying McCain knew the post-invasion would be difficult. But McCain has displayed ignorance about that as well:
“We’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. We may have to take out buildings, but we’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.” [CNN, 9/29/02]
“There’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias. So I think they can probably get along.” [MSNBC, 4/23/03]
McCain even reflected on the war last year and said, “it was easy.” “Well, it was easy. It was easy. I said we — a military operation would be easy. It was easy. We were greeted as liberators,” he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press in January 2007.
Not surprisingly, in his major national security address today, McCain reflected: “I am an idealist.”
Transcript:
COLMES: Senator, it is Alan. Welcome back to our show. One of the.
GRAHAM: Hey, Alan. How are you doing?
COLMES: Good to see you, sir. If you go back and look at the — you know John McCain talks about how consistent he has been, how he’s been right and you look back and I’ve gone over his statements today. He said in ’02 I believe the success will be fairly easy. He then said I believe we can win overwhelming victory in a very short time.
Then he said we understood in the very beginning it would be very, very difficult. He said in ’06, a few years later. In ’03, he echoed what Bush said saying that the end was very much in sight. And then in ’07, he says I knew it was going to be long, hard and tough. He has changed his position of how easy this would be to win over and over and over again.
GRAHAM: I think you left out the part for four years where he was arguing with Secretary Rumsfeld standing up in front of the entire world, including his own party, saying this strategy is not working. I have been to Iraq 11 times. John has been eight. I have been with him from the fall of Baghdad up until the surge. Alan, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say this is the McCain surge and he has never.
COLMES: How do you go from saying it’s going to be really easy to I’ve never said it was going to be easy.
GRAHAM: He’s never.
COLMES: It’s going to be tough…
(CROSSTALK) COLMES: … to be tough, he changed his position on that.
GRAHAM: My friend, he said that beating the Saddam Hussein regime militarily was quick and it was lethal. He has never said that this war would be easy. He has been the guy saying for four years that we’re getting it wrong. We need more troops.
COLMES: I believe success will be fairly easy.
(CROSSTALK)
GRAHAM: We’re losing, not winning. The only reason we are winning now in Iraq is because John had the courage to stand up when nobody else would and say we need more troops. We don’t have enough troops.
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