100 Years

To back up something Josh Marshall's been pounding, the idea that there's something unfair about the "out of context" use of John McCain's line about being willing to stay in Iraq for 100 or 10,000 years is pretty silly. Obviously, it's hard to quote anyone or refer to anything without taking it a bit out of context. But the context in which McCain is saying this stuff, is a context in which McCain genuinely believes that there is no level of resources which would be too great for the United States to invest in his futile quest for some ephemeral concept of "victory" in Iraq. There's no amount of money that's too much to spend, there's no amount of time that's too long, and there's no amount of American deaths that's too many.

Of course McCain hopes it doesn't take 100 to achieve that end state. But since his vision of the end state is utterly unrealistic (and includes a fantasy vision in which we peacefully organize a 10,000 basing agreement or something) it might as well. Clearly in a literal sense President McCain can't commit us to anything more than eight years of additional war in Iraq, but he's given us no indication that he would pull out any sooner than that, and no reason to believe he can succeed any faster than that. Maybe the DNC and the RNC can reach some kind of agreement in which both parties stipulate that we won't discuss the year 2108, but McCain will admit that he'll gladly have our troops still fighting in Iraq in 2016. But probably not.

And so as long as the hawks persist in not presenting to the public what they're actually talking about, the doves are going to have to use the footage available -- which is McCain talking about 100 or 10,000 rather than eight -- to make the point that in their more candid moments the hawks do concede that they're talking about a long hard slog in Iraq.