In a meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan today, John McCain reiterated his support for the surge, offered this reason for staying in Iraq:

“If we pull out of Iraq … then obviously the Iranian influence is dramatically increased, al Qaeda has greater influence and endangers the region dramatically, and the United States’s image and security challenges are dramatically increased.”

Of course, Iran’s current high level of influence in Iraq is almost entirely a result of the Iraq war itself. Iran has been the single biggest beneficiary of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Former diplomat Peter Galbraith wrote last September that Iraq was a “mission accomplished–for Iran“:

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran’s strategic victory is the most far-reaching. In establishing the border between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire in 1639, the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin demarcated the boundary between Sunni-ruled lands and Shiite-ruled lands. For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq dominated by Iran’s allies.) The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini’s army could not.

Journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote on March 10 that “the United States has spent most of the past five years in a de facto alliance with Iran in support of the Shiite-led (and US-installed) regime in Baghdad.”

Taking advantage of the political vacuum created by the US destruction of Saddam Hussein’s government, Tehran has established a vast presence, both overt and covert, in Iraq, with enormous influence among nearly all of its western neighbor’s Shiite and Kurdish parties. “The American military occupation of Iraq has facilitated an Iranian political occupation of Iraq,” says Chas Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. [...] Washington’s decision to topple Saddam’s government has put in place a ruling elite that is far closer to Iran than it is to the United States.

Far from weakening Iran’s hard-line government, as the Iraq war’s advocates insisted it would, the American invasion strengthened those forces, partly resulting in the 2005 election of the strident Iranian nationalist-Islamist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (One can’t overlook the stark disparities in the style of McCain’s and Ahmadinejad’s recent visits to Iraq. McCain arrived in secret, and wore a kevlar vest. Ahmadinejad announced his visit two weeks in advance, traveled by motorcade, and wore a double-breasted blazer.) For someone who likes to tout his own foreign policy expertise, McCain seems unaware that Iran continues to be the chief beneficiary of a war that he continues to support.

Today, Vice President Cheney spoke to U.S. troops at the Balad Air Force Base in Iraq. During the speech, he defended the war in Iraq as part of the “long-term struggle” that “became urgent on the morning of September 11th, 2001.” He also argued that the longer the war goes on, the more Iraqis “trust” and feel “better” about Americans:

We made a surge in operations, and the results are now clear: more effective raids to root out enemies; better and more accurate intelligence information from the locals; and higher hopes for the future from the Iraqi people. And across this country, the more that Iraqis have gotten to know Americans — the nature of our intentions, and the character of our soldiers — the better they’ve felt about the United States of America.

They know, above all, that America can be trusted. They know we’re a nation that accepts a hard job, and keeps at it even if others may tire of the effort. And we’ll continue working to help this young democracy, to be an example to others, and to be an ally in the war on terror.

In reality, the longer the United States stays in Iraq, the more frustrated Iraqis become. According to a BBC/ABC/ARD/NHK poll released yesterday, the number of Iraqis who don’t have “very much confidence” in U.S. occupation forces is at 33 percent — the highest point since 2003. Forty-six percent of Iraqis have no confidence at all, compared to just four percent with a “great deal of confidence.”

Forty-six percent of Iraqis also believe that the overall security situation in Iraq would be better if U.S. forces left entirely, compared to 29 percent who believe the situation would get worse. Additionally, 53 percent say that Bush’s “surge” has “made overall security worse, not better.”

Iraqis aren’t the only ones souring on the United States. According to a 2007 BBC poll, global opinion of America continues to plummet each day troops remain in Iraq:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has spent a majority of his presidential campaign trying to convince voters that he is the most qualified to tackle foreign policy issues:

I would believe that my knowledge and experience and background clearly indicates that if the phone rang in the White House and I was the one to answer it, I would be the one to best address a national security crisis. [3/3/08]

I have the most experience of any presidential candidate when it comes to foreign policy and advancing our national and economic security priorities around the globe. [1/29/08]

On matters of war and peace, I offer Americans my experience, my personal familiarity with the tragedy of war, [and] deep involvement in all of the national security issues of the last two decades… [11/18/07]

Of course, McCain’s supposed prescient understanding of foreign policy has been proven faulty over and over. Today, as the Washington Post’s Cameron Barr and Michael Shear report, McCain further undermined his claim to be the best qualified on matters of foreign policy, when he repeated a mistaken claim that Iran was training al Qaeda fighters:

Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives “taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”

Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate’s ear. McCain then said: “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”

He made the same assertion on right-wing Hugh Hewitt’s radio show last night. Listen here:

The “common knowledge” McCain cites is simply false. Far from working together, Iran and al Qaeda represent opposing sides in the Iraq civil war. Al Qaeda is a Sunni Muslim extremist group, while Iran is ruled by Shiites, where they make up 90 percent of the population.

McCain, the so-called foreign policy expert, is confusing reports that Iran was aiding Shiite insurgents in Iraq — one of the groups that virulently opposes al Qaeda. Even some aspects of those reports have been disputed.

Considering he had to correct McCain himself, does Lieberman still insist that McCain is “almost always right on the big issues in foreign policy”?

(HT: Matthew Yglesias)

Digg It!

It’s become quite fashionable among neoconservative supporters of the Iraq invasion to hide behind their own version of the incompetence dodge, casting blame into an ever-smaller circle of culprits. On Sunday, the New York Times offered several of these characters an opportunity to employ this “neo-incompetence dodge.”

Among them, Richard Perle continues to insist that invading Iraq was “the right decision,” but that the trouble began when “rather than turn Iraq over to Iraqis to begin the daunting process of nation building…we sent an American to govern Iraq.”

L. Paul Bremer underestimated the task, but did his best to make a foolish policy work. I had badly underestimated the administration’s capacity to mess things up.

Former director of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans Douglas Feith has likewise sought to cast blame on Bremer for “mishandling…the political transition” in Iraq. Like Perle, Feith continues to believe that the decision to invade was correct, but, according to the Washington Post, Feith blames Bremer for refusing to implement Feith’s plans to hand power to a group of U.S.-handpicked Iraq exiles like Ahmed Chalabi. Feith asserts that any good done by Bremer “was outweighed by the harm caused by the fact of occupation.”

In a CNN interview on Sunday, Paul Bremer fired back at Perle and Feith, suggesting that “the architects are running away from their building here.” Bremer asserts that the plan for a slow political transition conducted under the auspices of a longer-term U.S. military occupation was approved by President Bush , and condemns as unrealistic Feith’s and Perle’s plan to “simply hand over [power] to a group of unrepresentative exiles.” Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress “suffered a humiliating defeat” in the December 2005 elections, scoring “a minuscule 0.36 percent of the votes.”

AEI analyst Danielle Pletka contributes her own charming twist on the incompetence dodge, blaming the Iraqi people themselves for not embracing the opportunities afforded them by the American military occupation. Alas, Pletka laments, “there is no freedom gene, no inner guide that understands the virtues of civil society, of secret ballots, of political parties.” Pletka claims that “living under Saddam Hussein’s tyranny for decades conditioned Iraqis to accept unearned leadership, to embrace sect and tribe over ideas, and to tolerate unbridled corruption,” but seems blissfully unaware of how past U.S. support for Saddam’s regime could have conditioned Iraqis to suspect American motives as less than completely altruistic, or how the brutality inherent in any foreign occupation is not an atmosphere conducive to building trust between parties.

Trying to rescue their reputations by frantically casting blame on others (in Pletka’s case, on a whole country), Perle, Feith, and Pletka refuse to admit that the invasion of Iraq was a staggering foreign policy blunder which can never be rehabilitated, only mitigated. Until we understand that the Iraq war was a failure in its conception, not in its implementation, we will be doomed to more Iraqs in the future.