McCain’s future rides on Iraq’s

WASHINGTON – There is no mistaking the anguish of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Sitting in his Senate office, he is uncharacteristically subdued, his voice at times almost inaudible.

Although the Bush administration this week finally embraced his long-standing call to send more troops to Iraq, McCain believes the way it has handled the war “will go down as one of the worst” mistakes in the history of the American military.

“One of the most frustrating things that’s ever happened in my political life,” he said, “is watching this train wreck.”

McCain, an all-but-announced presidential candidate, offered those assessments toward the end of a lengthy interview Thursday night. No politician in the United States is more clearly identified with President Bush’s new policy, and no politician has more to lose if it fails. Democratic opponents have already coined a name for the troop “surge”: the McCain Doctrine.

McCain made it clear that he supports Bush’s plan to send more than 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq as the only way to prevent that country from slipping further into chaos. “I cannot guarantee success, but I can guarantee failure if we don’t adopt this new strategy,” he said.

But he also voiced deep frustration over what the war has done, both to this country and to Iraq. “I think many things that have happened in the world that are unfavorable to the United States are the result of our weakness in the Iraqi conflict,” he said.

Asked how the war may affect his candidacy, McCain shrugged off the question. “I can’t think about it or worry about it,” he said. “I have to do what I think is right.”

On the night of Bush’s speech, he told CNN’s Larry King: “I would much rather lose an election than lose a war.”

The risk now is that both could be lost.

As a forceful advocate for a policy that appears to fly in the face of the message voters sent in November, the politician who has long played for the center of the electorate now finds himself isolated on the right.

“The war is going badly, and he is now the leading public advocate of more of the same or even much more of the same,” said Ron Klain, a Democratic strategist who was chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore. “That’s an odd place to be.”

McCain said the policy’s defenders must work harder to change public opinion. “I admit that this is a challenge to us,” he said. “But I can make the coun- terargument that withdrawal means defeat and chaos.” Advocates for withdrawal, he said, must explain why that would not result in even greater chaos.

“What happens when Americans are no longer there?” he asked. “I think you could see some pretty horrific scenes on television sets in America.”

It is a considerable irony, given their histories, that McCain’s political future is now so closely tied to the president’s ability to bring the Iraq war to a successful conclusion.

The two battled bitterly over the 2000 GOP presidential nomination. In 2004, they brokered a rapprochement that appeared politically beneficial to both: Bush gained the high-profile support of the Republican with the broadest appeal to independent voters, and McCain gained respect and admiration from conservative Republicans who had opposed his candidacy in 2000 and who are critical to his hopes for the nomination in 2008.

At the 2004 Republican National Convention, McCain offered lavish praise for Bush as a wartime president.

McCain said he has no regrets over the role he played in helping Bush win re-election, despite his belief that the administration has so badly mismanaged the war. “Did I support the strategy? No, I didn’t,” he said. “But I certainly didn’t see his opponent, who was advocating withdrawal, as advocating any kind of viable proposal,” he added, referring to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

His differences with the administration, McCain said, were well known as far back as 2004 – his lack of confidence in then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his belief even then that the administration needed to send more troops to Iraq. “Every hearing, every opportunity that I had – my staff has compiled it already a hundred times where I said, ‘This is not going right. You’ve got to get more people on the ground here,’ ” he said.

McCain has long tried to balance his advocacy for the mission in Iraq with his criticism of the administration, always putting some distance between himself and the White House. He did the same in the days before Bush’s prime time speech Wednesday night. “There are two keys to any surge of U.S. troops,” he said at a forum at the American Enterprise Institute. “To be of value, the surge must be substantial and it must be sustained.”

Does the new policy meet those tests? McCain offers an equivocal answer. He said he has been assured by Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the president’s choice to take over command in Iraq, that 20,000 additional troops should be enough, but that if they are not, Petraeus can ask Bush for more.

“He tells me, ‘I think I can do it with this number,’ ” McCain said. “So I’m supposed to be a Monday-morning quarterback? I’m not going over there and command. I’m only sitting here trying to figure out the best way we can win this conflict.”