McCain continues call for more troops in Iraq

NY Times:

Senator John McCain is accustomed to staking out a lonely piece of ground, but on Iraq he is virtually an army of one. Nearly alone among major political figures in calling for an increase in American forces in Iraq, Mr. McCain is either taking a principled stand or a huge political gamble. Or both.

A majority of Americans now say they think invading Iraq was a mistake and would like to see the withdrawal of at least some of the nearly 150,000 troops there, polls say. Only one in seven Americans agrees with Mr. McCain that the United States should send more soldiers and marines. Even President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who assert that victory is the only acceptable outcome of the war, have not dared publicly to advocate additional deployments.

...

Mr. McCain contends that the war in Iraq is worth fighting and is worth winning. He has said consistently from the start of the conflict that the only way to prevail is to send enough soldiers to do the job. His current proposal is to send 20,000 additional troops in hopes of bringing Baghdad and the restive western provinces under control.

The alternative, he said, is humiliation for the United States and disaster for Iraq.

“We’re paying a price for the failure of our policy in the past,” Mr. McCain said Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, “and the question, then, before the American people is, are we ready to quit? And I believe the consequences of failure are chaos in the region, which will spread.”

Mr. McCain said that the fate of the Iraqi venture would be decided in the next six months or so and that signaling the intention to depart, regardless of facts on the ground, only guaranteed defeat. But he also said he was willing to reach a different conclusion if the generals in charge of the American military operation or if the members of the commission led by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, came up with a workable alternative.

Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of United States forces in Iraq, and top intelligence officials will go before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday to face questioning about the war for the first time since last week’s election, which many viewed as a referendum on Iraq. The Baker study group is expected to report its preliminary findings and recommendations next month.

...

“God bless him, he’s about the only serious person in this whole debate,” said Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative research organization in Washington. “Even a supporter of the war like myself would have to acknowledge that we’re in a mess, so the question is what to do about it. And McCain is saying we ought to do what we should have done in the first place, which was send enough troops to do the job. That seems counterintuitive because the whole momentum of emotions in the country at this point is to get out of there.”

The story's assertion about Bush and Cheney misses the point of their position. They have been backing the commander's strategy for Iraq and in this case Gen. Abizaid has been the one responsible for troop request, despite the best efforts of the NY Times and others to pin that position on departing Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. I am sure that one of the alternatives under consideration in the Pentagon review of strategy in Iraq is sending of additional troops. The alternative is a prescription for defeat, but that is what the Ny Times and many liberals want.