Of course if CNN reporters are going to start talking unprompted about Iranian links to AQI it’s hard to imagine John McCain getting the grief he deserves for not knowing what he’s talking about. After all, the press doesn’t know what it’s talking about, either.

The US military in Iraq has put together a profile of the typical AQI foreign fighter. Spencer Ackerman calls him Mr. AQI and reports:

But Iraq wasn’t what he thought it would be. Mr. AQI wasn’t an infantryman, where he’d bravely stand and fight Americans, he was pressured into being a suicide bomber. Nor were his targets the Americans he wanted to hit — they were the Iraqis he came to avenge. According to Colonel Bacon, in some cases, Mr. AQI was happy to be in American custody, where he would no longer cause Iraq any more pain.

Let that sink in for a moment. For Mr. AQI has a lesson for us. Counterfactual conditionals are always problematic, but in all likelihood, according to MNF-I’s own profile, if the United States. were not in Iraq, Mr. AQI would be back in his taxi in Algiers or Jedda. Were it not for Abu Ghraib — which, of course, never would have happened had we not invaded — Mr. AQI would never have felt that it was his religious duty to kill Americans.

Personally, I don’t think you should regard counterfactual conditionals as a particularly problematic class of statement — assertions about causation can be transformed into assertions about counterfactuals and vice versa. Which brings us to the point. People join AQI to fight us in Iraq. Our being in Iraq isn’t stopping them from fighting us “over here,” it’s causing them to fight us “over there.” Iraq would still have lots of problems if we left, of course, but there’s every reason to believe the al-Qaeda element there would be rapidly wiped out with its supply of new recruits cut off.

Robert Farley posted this old scaremongering video yesterday:

He made the point that nothing in it was true, that “No one, whether in uniform or no, who was part of the project to make the documentary or who appeared on the video is stupid enough to believe any of the things that it argues.” This by way of building up to the point that “there was nothing new or unusual about the body of deception associated with the Iraq War.”

That’s the depressing truth about Iraq — it wasn’t the first time a bundle of made-up scare stories was used to sell the public on some dumb venture and it won’t be the last. Indeed, even presidents trying to sell foreign policies I approve of (FDR before Pearl Harbor, say) aren’t always winning gold stars in the honesty sweepstakes.

Peter Feaver has a fascinating article in The Weekly Standard arguing that to win in November, John McCain needs to grab the bull by the horns and make the case on the merits that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Feaver goes on to say various things I disagree with (from arguing that the case can be persuasively made to calling it a “myth” that administration officials intentionally misled the public), but he’s persuasive on the idea that simply bracketing the decision to launch the war won’t work.

DoD photo by Lance Cpl. Albert F. Hunt, U.S. Marine Corps

Delivering a speech on Iraq to mark the fifth anniversary of the war, Barack Obama returns to the fundamental issue argument of his campaign:

History will catalog the reasons why we waged a war that didn’t need to be fought, but two stand out. In 2002, when the fateful decisions about Iraq were made, there was a President for whom ideology overrode pragmatism, and there were too many politicians in Washington who spent too little time reading the intelligence reports, and too much time reading public opinion. The lesson of Iraq is that when we are making decisions about matters as grave as war, we need a policy rooted in reason and facts, not ideology and politics.

Now we are debating who should be our next Commander in Chief. And I am running for President because it’s time to turn the page on a failed ideology and a fundamentally flawed political strategy, so that we can make pragmatic judgments to keep our country safe. That’s what I did when I stood up and opposed this war from the start, and said that we needed to finish the fight against al Qaeda. And that’s what I’ll do as President of the United States.

On the question of “too little time reading the intelligence reports, and too much time reading public opinion” I often wonder what public opinion might have looked like had the war met with more vigorous opposition. Certainly to me the fact that Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, etc. were supporting the war was an important consideration. If Bush was lying about the intelligence, I figured that those people, who had access to classified data, would be exposing the lies not going along with them. Obviously that doesn’t look like very smart reasoning in retrospect, but I can’t have been the only one who was swayed, in part, by the very fact of bipartisan support for the war. If Democratic leaders had opposed it, I imagine the war would have been much less popular.

Max Bergmann says of John McCain’s al-Qaeda/Iran mix-up:

That is not a gaffe. That is called believing something that isn’t true. It is called being confused. And being confused about the differences between Shia and Sunni when claiming that you should be elected president of the United States on your foreign policy knowledge and experience, is simply not okay. This is a big deal.

Yes, it is a big deal, especially because, as Ezra Klein notes, “McCain has a fairly aggressive policy take on Iran and the long-time belief that they were an al Qaeda safeground may have contributed to his thinking.” Quite so. Certainly the Iranian nuclear issue would look very different if I thought the Iranian government were training al-Qaeda operatives on a regular basis and working hand-in-glove with them in Iraq.

Allen Pizzey is unimpressed with the success of the surge or with Dick Cheney’s description of the overall package as “a successful endeavor.” But what does Pizzey know? He’s just a long-time veteran of the Iraq reporting game who’s traveled many times to Baghdad over an eighteen year period. Why trust him when we could listen to John “I don’t know the difference between Iran and al-Qaeda” McCain?

Dan Kurtzer and Ann Lews go to a UJC meeting to act as surrogates for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, respectively:

Next question to Kurtzer: Obama’s assertion that he needn’t have a “Likud view” — that of Israel’s right-wing party — to be pro-Israel. Kurtzer explained that Obama wanted to see a “plurality of views.” Silence in the room.

To that, Lewis retorted: “The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.” The audience members applauded.

That’s really pretty absurd. For one thing, it’s totally off the subject of what Obama said. And does it really need to be pointed out that the role of the President of the United States isn’t “to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel” but to adopt the right policies for the United States?