Fun With Definitions: John McCain-style

The other day, in an interview with CBS News, John McCain got his timeline of events in Iraq confused.  In response to Barack Obama's assertion that factors other than "the surge"--specifically the so-called Sunni Awakening--had contributed to the reduction in violence in Iraq, McCain accused Obama of not knowing his history and proceeded to describe events that took place months prior to the announcement of "the surge" as being a product of "the surge."  

 

Now that he's been called on it, rather than concede his error, McCain is doubling-down: 

The Arizona senator told reporters Wednesday afternoon that when he refers to the surge, it encompasses not just the January 2007 increase in troop levels but also the counter-insurgency that started in Iraq’s Al Anbar province months prior.

“A surge is really a counter-insurgency strategy, and it’s made up of a number of components,” McCain said. “This counter-insurgency was initiated to some degree by Colonel McFarland in Anbar province, relatively on his own."

It’s amazing that a guy whose entire campaign revolves around his supposed foreign policy expertise and his support for “the surge” specifically could manage to make himself look this foolish. 

First, to state the obvious, the word "surge" is not a term of art with some agreed-upon military definition.  It's a political term that was coined to describe a plan to send more troops to Iraq.  No one from either side of this debate has ever defined “the surge” as anything other than the actual influx of new troops that took place in early 2007. Indeed, the term “surge” was not even a part of our national lexicon at the time the Sunni Awakening began in late 2006. To define “the surge” as shorthand for an effective counter-insurgency strategy is completely absurd. The political debate that took place in early 2007 was not about whether counter-insurgency tactics should be used, but whether an additional 20,000 troops should be deployed to the region.

Which brings us to the other obvious flaw in McCain’s definitional gimmick. If you define “the surge” as broadly as he does here, you can no longer claim that Barack Obama opposed it. Obama, of course, has never been opposed to the use of more effective counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq.  Indeed, from the moment Obama arrived in the Senate in 2004, he criticized the Bush administration for failing to appreciate that it was dealing with an insurgency and adopting appropriate counter-insurgency techniques. For example, in this 2005 speech Obama argued that we need to “focus our efforts on a more effective counter-insurgency strategy and take steam out of the insurgency.”  His point at the time was that the Bush administration had failed to re-evaluate policies in Iraq that had contributed to the growth of the insurgency.

McCain and his surrogates are slamming Obama for supposedly failing to acknowledge that he was wrong about "the surge," even going as far as to assert that Obama's failure to do so is reminiscent of George Bush's own inability to admit error.  The truth, however, is that Obama has, on numerous occasions, acknowledged that "the surge" has contributed--along with a number of other factors--to the decreased violence in Iraq, and he's praised the troops for their outstanding efforts.  McCain on the other hand, stubbornly refuses to acknowledge when he gets basic facts wrong, instead resorting to ludicrous definitional games to try to explain why what he said was correct all along.