No doubt, history will not be kind to George W Bush. And to be sure, Bush is already returning the favor. Apparently stunned by the Russian assault on Georgia, President Bush forgot his invasion of "sovereign" Iraq and declared, "Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century". As it turns out, John McCain, Condoleezza Rice and Mitt Romney all failed the same test on 21st century history.

While unwilling to acknowledge that he had misread Vladimir Putin's soul back in 2001, President Bush on August 11th issued a tough statement about Moscow's massive retaliation against Tbilisi:

"It now appears that an effort may be underway to depose Russia's duly elected government. Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century."

While Bush misspoke in describing "Russia's duly elected government," his point about a nation threatening a democracy was a none-too-thinly veiled effort to distinguish Moscow's invasion of Georgia from his own in Iraq.

For her part, Secretary of State Condi Rice didn't even bother with that feeble distinction. Rice, who in a replay of her pre-9/11 failure apparently missed the memo "Putin Determined to Strike in Georgia," also selectively edited the Iraq war out of the 21st century. On August 18th, she said:

"But I just want to emphasize again, Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used, that will make it - that - when it wishes to deliver a message, and that's its military power. That's not the way to deal in the 21st century."

Bush's would-be successor John McCain, too, got it wrong. On August 13th, McCain as part of his effort to capitalize on the Georgia crisis pronounced:

"In the 21st century, nations don't invade other nations."

That's McCain's selective amnesia would extend to the Iraq war is unsurprising. He wasn't merely wrong at almost every turn in the run-up to and the occupation of Iraq, he also happened to be one the war's biggest cheerleaders. Quick to cite the September 2001 anthrax attacks as a potential pretext to attack Saddam, in January 2002 McCain simply exhorted Americans, "next up, Baghdad!"

Then there's Mitt Romney. Rumored to top John McCain's list of potential running mates, Romney told right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt that Russia's assault on Georgia should cost it the 2014 Olympic Games:

"Well, Hugh, my own view is as the Caucuses are a hot spot, and as Russians have shown their willingness to act militarily against a sovereign nation, that the International Olympic Committee ought to revisit locating the Games elsewhere."

(Romney's willingness to parrot John McCain's talking points as part of his transparent effort to join the ticket borders on the comic. When Romney endorsed the Arizona Senator in February, he signaled his desire to follow John McCain follow Osama Bin Laden to the "gates of hell.")

With the leading lights of the Republican Party having failed 21st Century History 101, the task was left to the ever-excreable Dick Morris to explain it away on Fox News. Appearing on Hannity and Colmes, Morris comically argued that the American invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq came at the request of a democratically-elected government in Baghdad. Attacking Barack Obama's self-evident message to the Russians that "it helps if we are leading by example," Morris argued:

"Where he's wrong is that we went into Iraq at the invitation of the government, not as an invasion."

"We're in Iraq as the result of a democracy asking for us to come in there. It's not an invasion."

And so it goes. The best and brightest of the GOP fundamentally misrepresent recent history, yet theirs is labeled the party of national security. And John McCain, the man who repeatedly failed the commander-in-chief test on Iraq, gets glowing grades from the media just the same.

The announcement today that the United States will deploy up to 15,000 more troops to Afghanistan is just the latest signal of the Pentagon's seeming support for Barack Obama's strategy to fight Al Qaeda in the region. Following by just weeks Obama's latest call to send at least two more brigades of American troops there, the request by U.S. commanders again confirmed Obama's assertion, one denied by John McCain, that Iraq represents a "zero sum game" for scarce American military resources.

That request by General David McKiernan, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, comes on the heels of Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen's agreement with Senator Obama that the situation along the Pakistan frontier is "precarious and urgent." The need is urgent indeed: in July, 9 American troops were killed in an insurgent raid that overran a U.S. border outpost; yesterday, 10 French soldiers were killed in a Taliban attack. In response, General McKiernan hopes to bolster the 101st Airborne Division with up to three brigades.

But as U.S. News reported this morning, the challenge for McKiernan and his staff is finding the needed troops. While their ask has been approved, a defense official noted, "Now that means we just need to figure out a way to get them there." As McKiernan himself made clear, the only "way" is to get the troops from Iraq:

Finding those particular troops to supplement the 101st, however, depends on conditions and troop levels in Iraq, adds McKiernan, who took over the NATO command in June. "That's really a zero-sum decision."

In early July, Admiral Mullen admitted as much. On the very day that 2,200 U.S Marines learned their tours in Afghanistan will be extended by 30 days, Mullen told reporters that the United States could only deploy more forces there by first drawing down from Iraq:

"I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq. Afghanistan has been and remains an economy-of-force campaign, which by definition means we need more forces there."

And on that point, Barack Obama and John McCain part company. From almost the inception of his campaign, Obama has argued that the diversion of U.S. military assets from Afghanistan to Iraq meant that "the people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice." In a June speech, Obama highlighted McCain's denial of this inescapable point:

"We had al Qaeda and the Taliban on the run back in 2002. But then we diverted military, intelligence, financial, and diplomatic resources to Iraq. And yet Senator McCain has said as recently as this April that, 'Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq.' I think that just shows a dangerous misjudgment of the facts, and a stubborn determination to ignore the need to finish the fight in Afghanistan."

McCain's denial - and disagreement with the Pentagon - over the trade-offs in sending more U.S. forces to the Afghan-Pakistan frontier doesn't end there. While McCain reversed course and mimicked Obama's call for more troops in Afghanistan, he fudged as to whether they should come from the United States or its NATO allies. Cornered on the question of where he intends to come up with the needed reinforcements, McCain feebly responded:

"We need to work that out. We need to have greater participation on the part of our NATO allies, as I said in my opening remarks today, and we need a lot more help."

Still, McCain's confused and contradictory statements didn't stop him from calling for "surge for Afghanistan" on July 15. (As Steve Benen rightly noted, a "surge" is now John McCain's prescription for all ills, foreign and domestic.) But as General McKiernan reiterated today, the United States doesn't need a surge in the fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but a long-term commitment:

He disputes the notion that the three brigades on the way represent a troop "surge" for Afghanistan, predicting the need for an extended involvement of a larger force. "I've certainly said that we need more security capabilities," he says. "But I would not use the term 'surge,' because I think we need a sustained presence."

At every turn, the Pentagon has backed Barack Obama's approach to defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions. While John McCain in February ridiculed Barack Obama's call for unilateral American strikes against Al Qaeda targets within Pakistan, the Bush administration and the Pentagon soon adopted Obama's thinking. (Just today, an apparent U.S. missile strike killed 18 militants in South Waziristan.)

Earlier this week, the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy released their annual "Terrorism Index." Their survey of 100 bipartisan foreign policy analysts found that 51% believe Pakistan will be the next Al Qaeda stronghold; exactly zero said "Iraq." 80% said the U.S. had not dedicated enough resources to Afghanistan, while 69% called for redeploying the majority of American troops from Iraq over the next 18 months.

All of which sounds like it could have come from Barack Obama. Or, as was made clear again today, from the Pentagon.

That, at least, is the implication of McCain's suggestion Friday to the National Urban League. As ABC and ThinkProgress detailed, McCain addressed a question about how to battle crime in American cities by praising Rudy Giuliani's tactics in New York and the U.S. military surge in Iraq:

"And some of those tactics - you mention the war in Iraq - are like that we use in the military. You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control. And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement, etc, etc."

But long before the American military's community policing in Baghdad became a model for Baltimore, John McCain (along with many other Republicans) seemed to suggest that Sadr City was as safe as San Diego.

Dating back to 2002, McCain repeatedly downplayed the dangers U.S. troops would face in Iraq, all in the name of helping to sell the coming war against Saddam. But in extolling the progress of the surge over the past 18 months, McCain's cheerleading has at times taken on almost comic extremes.

One of his more surreal moments came on April 1, 2007 (literally April Fool's Day - you can't make this stuff up). Wearing a bulletproof vest and guarded by "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead," McCain briefly toured a Baghdad market to demonstrate that the American people were "not getting the full picture." As ThinkProgress recounted:

McCain recently claimed that there "are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today." In a press conference after his Baghdad tour, McCain told a reporter that his visit to the market today was proof that you could indeed "walk freely" in some areas of Baghdad.

And just this past March, Senator McCain returned to the tried and untrue Republican talking point: Iraq was no more dangerous than most major American cities. McCain announced, "There's problems in America with safe neighborhoods as we well know." In this case, at least, even McCain realized his statement was non-sensical on its face and sounded the retreat. "I'm not making that comparison, because it's much more deadly in Iraq obviously," he said, adding, "But it's kind of the same theory."

As it turns out, McCain is far from alone in the Republican amen corner in claiming that Iraqi cities are as safe, if not safer, than their American counterparts. In August 2003, Fox News' Brit Hume announced that California was more dangerous for Americans than Iraq. That June, Donald Rumsfeld said "there's going to be violence in a big city" like Baghdad - or Washington, D.C. By February 2006, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) was comparing the busy streets of Baghdad to Manhattan. And on that same April 2007 trip in which McCain said Americans could "walk freely" in areas of Baghdad, Indiana Republican Mike Pence concluded that the Iraqi capital was "just like anyopen-air market in Indiana in the summertime."

But none of those men are running for President of the United States. John McCain's sales job to Americans of the safe, serene cities of Iraq was grotesque. Now, his suggestion of an Iraq-style surge on the American homefront is simply beyond the pale.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain is fond of claiming, "I know how to win wars." Apparently, he also has ideas about how to start them. In the fall of 2001, McCain suggested the recent anthrax attacks that so terrified Americans might be a perfect pretext for war with Iraq.

That revelation comes via ThinkProgress in the wake of this morning's revelations about the suicide of Bruce Ivins, the Fort Detrick biodefense researcher about to be indicted for the 2001 attacks. As it turns out, McCain like other conservatives was quick - and only too happy - to point the finger at Saddam Hussein. Appearing on the David Letterman show on October 18, 2001, McCain suggested that the anthrax attacks augured a "second phase" in the war on terror, this time against Baghdad:

LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?

MCCAIN: I think we're doing fine...I think we'll do fine. The second phase - if I could just make one, very quickly - the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don't have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may - and I emphasize may - have come from Iraq.

LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?

MCCAIN: If that should be the case, that's when some tough decisions are gonna have to be made.

Whether or not Ivins was guilty of the allegations remains to be seen and may never be known. But thanks in part to spurious government leaks abetted by media outlets like ABC, John McCain and his allies in the Bush administration looked to that mysterious white powder as magic pixie dust for starting a war with Iraq seven years ago.

The timing of McCain's 2001 jaw-dropping attempt to manufacture a casus belli with Baghdad couldn't be more ironic. Only yesterday, ThinkProgress detailed Seymour Hersh's assertion that Vice President Cheney hoped to start a shooting war with Tehran by deploying bogus Iranian PT boats manned by Navy SEALS who would in turn trigger an incident in the Persian Gulf. And Kevin Drum reminded us, British memos revealed that in January 2003 President Bush proposed disguising U.S. aircraft flying over Iraq in UN colors to lure Saddam to fire on them.

As I noted earlier this week, John McCain's record on Iraq disqualifies him using the very commander-in-chief test he touts. Now we can add ham-handed efforts to gin up a conflict with Saddam over the 2001 anthrax attacks to list of reasons why John McCain must never occupy the White House.

As McCain put it in his address to the American GI Forum Friday, Barack Obama failed the John McCain commander-in-chief test:

"Senator Obama and I also faced a decision, which amounted to a real-time test for a future commander-in-chief. America passed that test. I believe my judgment passed that test. And I believe Senator Obama's failed."

Sadly, when it comes to the war in Iraq, it is the Arizona Republican who failed his own commander-in-chief exam. At almost every turn in the run-up to the invasion and the ensuing American occupation, McCain's judgment was almost always wrong, often disastrously so. From his predictions of a short war, claims U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators and that the U.S. would find weapons of mass destruction to his announcements of mission accomplished, his ongoing confusion over friend and foe in Iraq and so much more, John McCain the would-be wartime president gets failing marks.

That F grade is not, as McCain insists, a "job for the historians." As his past statements show, American voters can reach that conclusion right now.

On Tuesday, Time columnist Joe Klein labeled as "shockingly unpresidential" John McCain's accusation that Barack Obama "would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign." But in announcing "I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate," Klein spoke a day too soon. As it turns out, McCain would top himself within 24 hours, charging that Obama would not stand up to genocide - an outrage leveled as the Democrat visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel.

To be sure, McCain's desperation over the events on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan shifting the debate in Obama's favor was on display repeatedly Tuesday. In Rochester, New Hampshire, McCain essentially branded Obama's call for a strategic refocus against Al Qaeda along the Afghan border – one backed in Baghdad and at the Pentagon - the equivalent of treachery:

"This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign."

Tuesday night, McCain repeated his slander in an interview with CBS News' Katie Couric. (It was during that same conversation McCain experienced his rude awakening about the timeline of the surge in Iraq.)

"I would much rather lose a campaign than lose a war. Sen. Obama has indicated that by his failure to acknowledge the success of the surge, that he would rather lose a war than lose a campaign."

But for sheer chutzpah, the McCain campaign broke new ground the following day. After Barack Obama reiterated the cry of "never again" after his visit to the Holocaust Memorial, Team McCain put out a press release charging that Obama in July 2007 was only too happy to turn a blind eye to the prospect of genocide in Iraq.

Conveniently excluding Obama's July 20, 2007 statements that "Nobody is proposing we leave precipitously" and that "there are still going to be U.S. forces in the region that could intercede, with an international force, on an emergency basis," the McCain campaign cited only:

"Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now - where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife - which we haven't done."

As McCain aide Michael Goldfarb pathetically claimed just after Obama laid a wreath at Yad Vashem, "Today he says 'never again.' A year ago stopping genocide wasn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces in Iraq. Doesn't that strike you as inconsistent?"

Earlier this year, John McCain pledged to run a "respectful campaign." Of course, with McCain's grotesque assertions about Obama's supposed Hamas ties and that Obama's word "cannot be trusted," that promise went out the window long ago.

As did John McCain's political courage, if he ever had any. Battered by his botched recollection of the Sunni awakening and perhaps shamed by the disgusting performance of his campaign team over the past 24 hours, John McCain canceled a press availability session scheduled for earlier today.

To John McCain's dismay, the chorus of voices bolstering Barack Obama's call for a strategic refocus from Iraq to Afganistan just keeps growing. Just one day before Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki indisputably endorsed Obama's time frame for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, General David Petraeus reported that the diminished Al Qaeda threat there was being weakened still further by the group's movement of foreign fighters to Afghanistan. Now, Samir Sumaida'ie, the Iraqi ambassador to Washington, has joined Petraeus in his assessment.

On Wednesday, Sumaida'ie reported that AQI, battered by the Sunni Awakening, the Sons of Iraq program and the recent joint U.S. Iraqi assault on its last urban bastion in Mosul, is shifting resources to its safe haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border:

"We have heard reports recently that many of the foreign fighters that were in Iraq have left, either back to their homeland or going to fight in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is now seeming to be more suitable for al-Qaida fighters.

There were large tracts that were run by al-Qaida, administered by al-Qaida - they had ministers, administrators, paid salaries and so on. This no longer exists, so they do not have any territory to control (where it) is safe for them to move in and around Iraq," he said. "In whole areas they ceased to operate as effective terrorist networks."

Sumaida'ie's assessment comes just three days after the American commander in Iraq (and incoming CENTCOM chief) General Petraeus acknowledged Al Qaeda may be considering shifting focus to its original home base in Afghanistan:

"We do think that there is some assessment ongoing as to the continued viability of al-Qaida's fight in Iraq. They're not going to abandon Iraq. They're not going to write it off. None of that. But what they certainly may do is start to provide some of those resources that would have come to Iraq to Pakistan, possibly Afghanistan."

Petraeus' statement is consistent with the priorities articulated by his civilian counterpart, U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker. In April, Crocker acknowledged to Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) that the Afghan-Pakistan border region was the higher priority for the United States in its fight against Al Qaeda:

AMB. CROCKER: Well given the progress that has been made again Al Qaeda in Iraq, the significant decrease in its capabilities, the fact that it is solidly on the defensive, and not in a position of -

SEN. BIDEN: Which would you pick, Mr. Ambassador?

AMB. CROCKER: I would therefore pick Al Qaeda in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.

In his press conference Tuesday, Barack Obama voiced his concerns over "the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan," which he deemed "central front in the war against terrorism." Going forward, he argued, the American strategy in the global fight against Al Qaeda must:

"Refocus attention on Afghanistan and to go after the Taliban, including putting more troops on the ground, and to put more pressure on Pakistan to deal with the safe havens of terrorists."

Appearing on PBS Newshour, Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen concurred with Obama's take that the situation in Afghanistan is "precarious and urgent," but warned again that 10,000 additional troops needed there would not be available "in any significant manner" unless there are withdrawals from Iraq.

With the threat from Al Qaeda in his country markedly reduced, the Iraqi ambassador to the U.S. provided more support to do just that.

Neocon godfather Irving Kristol once famously said that "a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality." By that standard, the political right will need to coin an altogether new term to describe John McCain in the wake of the beating he has taken over the past several days. In the span of just two weeks, McCain has seen Barack Obama's call for a strategic refocus from Iraq to Afghanistan validated by the Pentagon and in Baghdad. And now, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has come out in favor of Obama's approach to drawing down U.S. forces in his country.

In an interview published Saturday in the German publication Der Spiegel, Maliki announced his idea of a "time horizon" for the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq very much resembles that of Senator Obama:

"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

While Maliki's statement is part posturing aimed to gain leverage in the troubled talks over the watered-down status of forces agreement with the Bush administration, it is clear rejection of the perpetual American presence along the lines of South Korea or Germany that John McCain has repeatedly trumpeted.

Despite the indisputable security progress of the Iraq surge he endorsed, McCain has seen events on the ground rapidly alter the political landscape in Obama's favor. At almost every turn, the developments of the past two weeks have made Obama look prescient indeed.

On July 3, Chairman of the Join Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen confirmed Barack Obama's assessment that the ongoing commitment of American resources to Iraq was a massive barrier to the U.S. from stemming the growing threat from Al Qaeda and the Taliban along the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. As Mullen bluntly put it:

"I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq. Afghanistan has been and remains an economy-of-force campaign, which by definition means we need more forces there."

Meanwhile, the negotiations with Baghdad over the long-term U.S. presence in Iraq favored by President Bush and John McCain hit an impasse. Prime Minister Maliki's position was echoed by foreign minister Mouwafak al-Rubaie who announced, "We will not accept any memorandum of understanding that doesn't have specific dates to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq." By July 12, even U.S. officials acknowledged "we are talking about dates," adding that leaders in Baghdad "are all telling us the same thing."

On Tuesday this week, Barack Obama delivered a major address on the path forward in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again noting the "the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 are still at large," Obama highlighted John McCain's claim that "Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq." But after Obama promised to "send at least two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, and use this commitment to seek greater contributions - with fewer restrictions - from NATO allies," McCain tried to top him, with disastrous results.

McCain's failed one-upsmanship started with a call for three brigades for Afghanistan. But the McCain campaign quickly ran into trouble over whether or not their man was promising more U.S. troops or relying instead on NATO units which to date have not been forthcoming. Within 24 hours, McCain was backing off those brigades, instead speaking in vague terms that, "We need to work that out, we need to have greater participation from our NATO allies, and we need a lot more help from our NATO allies." Worse still, on July 17th, a 2003 video surfaced in which John McCain almost comically proclaimed that the United States "can muddle through" in Afghanistan while focusing on Iraq.

Even the McCain campaign's attacks on Obama on Afghanistan boomeranged. When South Carolina Senator Jim Demint (R-SC) sent Obama a letter blasting him for not holding subcommittee meetings on Afghanistan, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joe Biden (D-DE) blasted back:

"Under my chairmanship the Foreign Relations Committee has addressed most Afghanistan issues at the Full Committee level," Biden wrote. "I believe that this is the best way of ensuring the most comprehensive examination of the complex issues involved, and of ensuring the highest-level Administration participation."

"Senator Obama has displayed great leadership on this issue: he called nearly a year ago for the deployment of at least two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan - it has since become the accepted position of a wide range of U.S. military officials, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Biden added.

And as it turns out, John McCain has attended exactly zero of those Committee meetings over the last two years.

Complicating matters further for McCain, the threat from Al Qaeda in Iraq has dramatically diminished even as Bin Laden's cadres are resurgent in the tribal areas of Pakistan. After AQI's devastating defeat in Mosul, the organization is without an urban base. As Stephen Biddle of the Council of Foreign Relations put it, Al Qaeda in Iraq is being reduced to "furtive terrorists."

And Iraq commander and incoming CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus largely agreed. Even as Barack Obama began his visit to Afghanistan, General Petraeus acknowledged Al Qaeda may be considering shifting focus to its original home base in Afghanistan:

"We do think that there is some assessment ongoing as to the continued viability of al-Qaida's fight in Iraq. They're not going to abandon Iraq. They're not going to write it off. None of that. But what they certainly may do is start to provide some of those resources that would have come to Iraq to Pakistan, possibly Afghanistan."

And to be sure, President Bush isn't helping his would-be Republican successor. On Friday, Bush reversed course on years of bashing Democrats on timelines for withdrawal, agreeing with Maliki on a "general time horizon" for a U.S. pull-out. And as Iranian-sponsored attacks in Iraq are on the decline, Bush signaled a major shift by sending a senior State Department official to the talks on Iran's nuclear program while considering an American diplomatic presence in Tehran.

Back in 2006, Stephen Colbert introduced President Bush to what can be called "Colbert's Law." As he put it, "reality has a well-known liberal bias." Over the past two weeks, John McCain started learning that the hard way.

UPDATE: Back in 2004, McCain acknowledged that "I think it's obvious that we would have to leave" if asked by a sovereign Iraqi government. Now, the McCain campaign claims Maliki's statement of support for Obama's approach is just for Iraqi domestic political consumption. "His domestic politics require him to be for us getting out," as an anonymous McCain aide put it.

In response to Barack Obama's address today on Iraq and Afghanistan, Republican presidential nominee John McCain declared, "I know how to win wars."

Now for the first time, the man who brought you Ahmad Chalabi and 100 years in Iraq offers all his war-winning secrets in How to Win Wars for Dummies. Insightful chapters like "How to Be Greeted as a Liberator," "Victory Will Be Rapid," "Declaring Mission Accomplished" and "Telling Shiite from Sunni" will get you up and running fast in your own global war on terror. And with helpful tips like "McCain's Guide to the Safe Streets of Baghdad" and "Overstaying Your Welcome," you don't have to be a septuagenarian war hero to be commander-in-chief.

Here are just some of the pearls from John McCain's How to Win Wars for Dummies:

The news that President Bush will begin drawing down U.S. troops in Iraq below pre-surge levels this fall is being greeted as an October surprise for John McCain. But even with the successes of the surge, events on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan are validating Barack Obama's call for a strategic refocus on Afghanistan. The Pentagon's admission of the urgent need to shift troops to counter the rising Al Qaeda threat along the Pakistan frontier, combined with the Iraqi government's growing insistence on a timetable for American withdrawal, means it is John McCain, and not Barack Obama, who finds himself in a box over the future of Iraq.

To be sure, there has been progress in Iraq since President Bush initiated the surge in January 2007. U.S. casualties are down dramatically while attacks against Iraqi civilians have dropped off as well. The "Sons of Iraq" program, while not without long term risks for the Shiite government in Baghdad, has helped debilitate the Sunni insurgency. After its initial disasters earlier this spring, the growing - and increasingly confident - Iraqi security forces rebounded in campaigns against the Mahdi army militias in Basra and Sadr City. And a joint American-Iraqi assault on Mosul devastated what's left of the Al Qaeda cadres in Iraq. (It is worth noting that the GAO disagreed with the White House's assessment earlier this month that 15 of 18 surge benchmarks had been met, calling progress in Iraq "fragile, reversible and uneven.")

Given John McCain's full-throated support for the surge and a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq, it's no wonder that the New York Times predictably concluded that a September reduction to 120,000 troops in Iraq would produce a political windfall for McCain:

Any troop reductions announced in the heat of the presidential election could blur the sharp differences between the candidates, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, over how long to stay in Iraq. But the political benefit might go more to Mr. McCain than Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain is an avid supporter of the current strategy in Iraq. Any reduction would indicate that that strategy has worked and could defuse antiwar sentiment among voters.

Not necessarily. And certainly not if Obama campaign makes the case that their man had America's national security priorities right not just in 2002, but today and going forward.

In contrast to John McCain's 100 year U.S. presence in Iraq, Barack Obama has focused like a laser beam on fighting the global threat from Al Qaeda where it lives - along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. As Obama put it just last month:

"The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice. They are Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their sponsors - the Taliban. They were in Afghanistan. And yet George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11...

...Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership - the people who murdered 3000 Americans - have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That's the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.

We had al Qaeda and the Taliban on the run back in 2002. But then we diverted military, intelligence, financial, and diplomatic resources to Iraq. And yet Senator McCain has said as recently as this April that, 'Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq.' I think that just shows a dangerous misjudgment of the facts, and a stubborn determination to ignore the need to finish the fight in Afghanistan."

And to be sure, President Bush's senior leadership at the Pentagon appears to agree with Obama. While Bush just last week suggested more troops were needed in Afghanistan, Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen acknowledged that was impossible until the U.S. began to draw down its forces in Iraq:

"I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq. Afghanistan has been and remains an economy-of-force campaign, which by definition means we need more forces there."

No doubt, those forces are surely needed there. The July 2007 NIE warned of a renewed Al Qaeda threat from its firmly entrenched safe haven in the Pakistani tribal areas (a reality which even President Bush was forced to acknowledge). While John McCain attacked Barack Obama over his willingness to launch unilateral strikes against Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, the Bush administration by February had adopted Obama's approach. By June 2008, American casualties reached their highest level in the seven year war in Afghanistan. (Just today, 9 more U.S. troops were killed and 15 more wounded in a Taliban assault on an American outpost near the Pakistan border.) With the situation deteriorating on the ground, 2,200 U.S. Marines have had their tours extended in Afghanistan, while the Times reports as many as 10,000 more American troops will join the 31,000 already deployed there.

Meanwhile in Baghdad, the negotiations over a new status of forces agreement between the United States and Iraq have John McCain into a corner. McCain, after all, proclaimed in 2004 that "I think it's obvious that we would have to leave" if asked by a sovereign, democratically-elected Iraqi government. Now that is exactly what Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his foreign minister Mouwafak al-Rubaie are demanding:

"Our stance in the negotiations underway with the American side will be strong...We will not accept any memorandum of understanding that doesn't have specific dates to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq."

As the Washington Post detailed this morning, the talks have essentially broken down and the prospects of a long-term agreement for the commitment of U.S. troops in Iraq with them, replaced instead by a temporary "bridge" extending the American presence into 2009:

The failure of months of negotiations over the more detailed accord -- blamed on both the Iraqi refusal to accept U.S. terms and the complexity of the task -- deals a blow to the Bush administration's plans to leave in place a formal military architecture in Iraq that could last for years.

Although President Bush has repeatedly rejected calls for a troop withdrawal timeline, "we are talking about dates," acknowledged one U.S. official close to the negotiations. Iraqi political leaders "are all telling us the same thing. They need something like this in there...Iraqis want to know that foreign troops are not going to be here forever."

Which is political problem for John McCain. On Tuesday, McCain pushed back on the Iraqi demands for a U.S. departure timeline, only to have his campaign scramble on Wednesday to spin the Iraqis' rejection of a long-term American presence. As the Post noted:

He has said he hopes to bring U.S. combat troops home by 2013 but has insisted that any timeline or lessening of U.S. control over its own operations would undercut recent military gains and aid U.S. enemies.

So the outlines of Barack Obama's winning formula of strategic refocus from Iraq to Afghanistan are clear:

• Finish the Job in Afghanistan. The overriding terrorist threat to the United States comes from Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The rising violence there along with the growing stability (and diminution of Al Qaeda in Iraq) makes the shift of American military resources a priority.
• No Permanent Presence in Iraq. John McCain notwithstanding, Iraq is not Germany, Japan or South Korea. In all three, the United States protects its allies against external enemies while projecting American power in their respective regions. The U.S. contingent in South Korea acts as a trip wire that would trigger massive American retaliation should Pyongyang attack. The U.S. has other bases throughout the Middle East with which to continue to pound Al Qaeda in Iraq and to deter Iran. American national security requirements, and not the lack of U.S. casualties (as John McCain insists), should drive discussions of a perpetual military commitment in Iraq - or anywhere else.
• No Al Qaeda Safe Havens in Iraq or Afghanistan. As Al Qaeda falters in Iraq, Bin Laden and his allies are resurgent along the Afghan-Pakistani border. After seven years of failure by the Bush administration, the United States must not allow Al Qaeda to entrench sanctuaries in either.
• Not a Referee or a Bodyguard in Baghdad. Over time, the government of Nouri al-Maliki may yet face renewed threats from Sunni factions currently mollified by the American "Sons of Iraq" program or from Shiite rivals like Moqtada al-Sadr. As the Unites States draws down its forces over the next 12 to 24 months, the top American priority there should be to prevent the resurgence of Al Qaeda. The American mission is not to provide a permanent bodyguard for Maliki, or to play referee in any future sectarian conflict that might emerge.

There is, of course, one additional point the Obama campaign should make in the debate over Iraq. John McCain was sadly wrong at almost every turn in promoting the invasion and occupation of Iraq. From his predictions of a short war and claims U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators to his announcements of mission accomplished, his ongoing confusion over friend and foe in Iraq and so much more, McCain's is an unbroken legacy of error.

UPDATE 1: In Monday's New York Times, Barack Obama lays out his case in an op-ed titled, "My Plan for Iraq."

UPDATE 2: On Tuesday, Obama delivered a major address on Iraq, Afghanistan and U.S. national security.

If John McCain has many more days like Tuesday, his only chance to get to the White House will be as a tourist. On the same day he dropped jaws with his joke about killing Iranians with cigarettes, McCain amazingly slammed Social Security as "an absolute disgrace." Then even as McCain's first-term balanced budget pledge was being pilloried in the press, Americans learned that 300 economists signed a statement supporting McCain which made no mention of it. And topping it all off, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's insistence on a timeline for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq put John McCain squarely on the defensive on his signature issue.

Coming on the heels of his April 2007 jest about "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," McCain's jest about killing Iranians with cigarettes of mass destruction served to once again raise eyebrows - and questions about his presidential temperament.

But that was hardly his most damaging gaffe of the day. While walking the fine line between extolling private retirement accounts without explicitly calling for the privatization of Social Security, John McCain stumbled directly onto the third rail of American politics. As Mother Jones reported Tuesday, John McCain during a Denver town hall meeting the day before attacked Social Security, the program responsible for dramatically reducing poverty among the elderly, for working exactly as designed:

"Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed."

Appearing on CNN Tuesday morning, McCain only compounded his error. Sounding like a rabid laissez-faire ideologue, an ignorant hack or more likely both, McCain told John Roberts:

"They pay their taxes and right now their taxes are going to pay the retirement of present-day retirees. That's why it's broken, that's why we can fix it."

As an amazed Jared Bernstein of the Economics Policy Institute put it, "It's like he's saying, 'I just found out that taxes come from people...that's a disgrace.'" MoJo's Nick Baumann summed it up nicely, "McCain is saying, again, that the problem with Social Security is that Social Security is Social Security." And given McCain's past support for Social Security privatization and his promise Monday to magically reign in entitlement spending in his comical effort to balance the budget by 2013, McCain no doubt just scared the bejesus out of America's senior citizens.

But McCain's woes on Tuesday hardly ended with his Social Security calamity. Just one day after his campaign proudly proclaimed 300 economists had endorsed his economic plan, the Politico revealed McCain's gambit to be a smoke-screen. The economists' statement, as it turned out, excluded the centerpieces of his "Jobs for America" document released Monday - a gas tax holiday and balancing the budget by the end of a first McCain term - precisely because so few believe in them:

Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don't actually support the whole of McCain's economic agenda. And at least one doesn't even support McCain for president.

In interviews with more than a dozen of the signatories, Politico found that, far from embracing McCain's economic plan, many were unfamiliar with - or downright opposed to - key details...

...The statement they signed is 403 words long - and there is no mention of the gas tax holiday or the deficit, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will approach $400 billion this year.

As for that balanced budget pledge, it's no wonder, as the Politico's Mike Allen reported, that McCain wants "no videotape of it to show later."

Still, McCain's disasters on the home front pale in comparison to the Iraq trap which ensnared him yesterday. Seeking to gain leverage in the talks over a new status of forces agreement with the United States, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mouwafak al-Rubaie echoed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's insistence that a timetable for withdrawal of American troops is a requirement:

"Our stance in the negotiations underway with the American side will be strong...We will not accept any memorandum of understanding that doesn't have specific dates to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq."

Sadly for John McCain and his vision of 100 year U.S. military presence in Iraq, McCain in 2004 acknowledged that American forces would have to go if a sovereign government in Baghdad demanded it:

"Well, if that scenario evolves than I think it's obvious that we would have to leave because - if it was an elected government of Iraq, and we've been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government then I think we would have other challenges, but I don't see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people."

After lambasting Mitt Romney and Barack Obama alike over withdrawal timelines, John McCain is now scrambling to address statements like those from Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh that the timeframe for a U.S. pull-out "can be 2011 or 2012." Exacerbating matters for McCain, the timeline quandary comes just days after Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen insisted that he can't shift badly needed troops to Afghanistan "until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq." To the consternation of the McCain campaign, the messages from Baghdad and the Pentagon sound like they were written by Barack Obama.

To be sure, Tuesday was a terrible day for John McCain. And judging by his new restrictions on campaign press, it sounds like Mr. Straight Talk just wants it all to go away.

UPDATE: As reader James notes in the Comments, McCain's Tuesday was even more self-destructive than I first reported. In an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, McCain took credit for orchestrating the release of American hostages from FARC rebels during his stop-over in Colombia:

Trib: What was the purpose of your recent trip to Colombia and did you accomplish what you hoped to accomplish?

McCain: Well, I'm happy to tell you that I orchestrated the rescue of those hostages.

As it turned out, McCain was joking. But in a statement almost as comic, McCain claimed that Iraqi government figures were in fact not calling for a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal from their country:

Trib: Senator, with Iraqi leaders now calling for a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals ...

McCain: Actually the Iraqis are not. The Iraqis widely reported as short a time ago as a couple of weeks ago that there would be no status of forces agreement, and Maliki would say that, and it got headlines, and of course it turned out not to be true.

The steady stream of bad news about Afghanistan this week served to highlight two inescapable truths regarding the conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. First, Barack Obama was right that the ongoing commitment of American forces in Iraq is preventing the United States from successfully pursuing Al Qaeda along the Pakistan frontier. Second, the Bush Doctrine - with its tenet of no safe havens for terrorists - is still dead.

In Washington, President Bush acknowledged that June, which saw the highest U.S. casualties of the Afghan war, was a "tough month." Bush, who is reported to have recently ordered U.S. intelligence assets and Special Forces to make a final push to capture Osama Bin Laden, then promised more soldiers and Marines for the fight. As Time rightly noted:

"We're going to increase troops by 2009," Bush said, without offering details about exactly when or how many.

The President would have done well to first consult with Admiral Michael Mullen, his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. On the very day that 2,200 U.S Marines learned their tours in Afghanistan will be extended by 30 days, Mullen admitted to reporters at the Pentagon that the United States could only deploy more forces there by first drawing down from Iraq:

"I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq. Afghanistan has been and remains an economy-of-force campaign, which by definition means we need more forces there."

Unfortunately, that "reduced requirement" in Iraq doesn't appear likely to happen time soon. As the AP reported last week, the Pentagon is preparing to rotate 30,000 troops in a move that maintain U.S. force levels in Iraq at 15 combat brigades through 2009. While General Petraeus may yet recommend further force reductions, American troop levels at 142,000 are currently slated to remain above pre-surge levels through next year.

Failing the commitment of additional forces by NATO members, the U.S. is going to have to rob Peter to pay Paul when it comes to choosing between the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his joint Senate testimony with General Petraeus in April, U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker to Baghdad acknowledged to Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) that the Afghan-Pakistan border region was the higher priority for the United States in its fight against Al Qaeda:

AMB. CROCKER: Well given the progress that has been made again Al Qaeda in Iraq, the significant decrease in its capabilities, the fact that it is solidly on the defensive, and not in a position of -

SEN. BIDEN: Which would you pick, Mr. Ambassador?

AMB. CROCKER: I would therefore pick Al Qaeda in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.

SEN BIDEN: That would be a smart choice.

Crocker's trade-off is precisely the one advocated by Barack Obama throughout the 2008 campaign. As he has insisted repeatedly, the Bush administration let Al Qaeda off the mat in 2002 and with its solitary focus on Iraq, has taken its eyes off the prize. As Obama put it just two weeks ago:

"The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice. They are Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their sponsors - the Taliban. They were in Afghanistan. And yet George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11...

...Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership - the people who murdered 3000 Americans - have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That's the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.

We had al Qaeda and the Taliban on the run back in 2002. But then we diverted military, intelligence, financial, and diplomatic resources to Iraq. And yet Senator McCain has said as recently as this April that, 'Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq.' I think that just shows a dangerous misjudgment of the facts, and a stubborn determination to ignore the need to finish the fight in Afghanistan."

As it turns out, Obama is right, and George W. Bush and John McCain are wrong, on both counts. As Admiral Mullen readily admitted, overstretched American forces in Iraq are simply unavailable for the campaign against Bin Laden. And as a devastating account in the New York Times Monday revealed, the Bush administration's diversion of assets to Iraq and its confused policy towards the Musharraf government enabled Al Qaeda to establish a safe haven in Pakistan.

Dating back to the moments after the September 11 attacks, "no safe havens" emerged as one of the three pillars of the Bush Doctrine. (The other two - preemptive war and democracy promotion - arose with the invasion of Iraq.) In his address to Congress on September 20, 2001, a determined President Bush declared his "no safe havens" principle even as the World Trade Center towers still smoldered in lower Manhattan:

"We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

But seven years later, an Al Qaeda safe haven in the Pakistani tribal regions is precisely what the United States now encounters. As President Bush himself confessed in the wake of a July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate:

"One of the most troubling [points in the NIE] is its assessment that al Qaeda has managed to establish a safe haven in the tribal areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan."

Little has changed since. As the New York Times details, the new Bush policy of authorizing unilateral strikes against Al Qaeda leaders and the deployment of U.S. Special Forces into Pakistan remains stymied by disagreements within the administration and with the new government in Islamabad. (Ironically, John McCain attacked Barack Obama for the same aggressive posture towards Al Qaeda in Pakistan that President Bush later adopted.) Despite the new-found willingness of the U.S. to act alone within Pakistan, Bush's past dependence on Musharraf and Musharraf's truce with tribal leaders sympathetic to Bin Laden and the Taliban had left Al Qaeda firmly entrenched:

"It is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan's tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world."

To paraphrase Chevy Chase from the old Saturday Night Live news sketches, the Bush Doctrine is still dead. For Barack Obama's part, he's still right when it comes to America's unfinished business with - and the White House's diversion of resources from - Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. As for President Bush and John McCain, they're still wrong.

Back in 2003, General Tommy Franks called Bush Iraq intelligence fabulist Douglas Feith "the f**king stupidest guy on the face of the earth." Two years later, Colin Powell's one-time aide Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said of Feith "seldom in my life have I met a dumber man." Defending Condoleezza Rice's - and by extension, President Bush's - pre-war "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" Iraq talking point, Douglas Feith today once again justified his critics' low opinion of him.

Writing at the National Review, Feith argued that Rice's September 8, 2002 statement on CNN was not either "a gaffe or a lie." Instead, he contended, Rice was merely "highlighting the limits of U.S. intelligence" in what he deemed "an important and accurate statement":

"You will get different estimates about precisely how close he is." She presented a summary of what the CIA was saying at the time about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, and then added: "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

There are, of course, a few problems with Feith's exercise. First, Feith's offers an abridged version of Rice's comments, selectively excluding her points about "shipments into Iran" and those "aluminum tubes" that "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs." While Feith laughably claimed that "Rice and all the other top Bush administration officials relied on erroneous intelligence" and that "they did so in good faith," Rice's mistaken claims were hotly disputed within the American intelligence community, as the 2002 NIE and the Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase 2 report made clear.

The second of Feith's fallacies is the implication of his assertion that "was a clear and proper warning that our country was subject to surprise." Apparently, wars of preemption are fine even when the data is dubious or the threat is unclear. Put another way, when in doubt, wipe 'em out.

But perhaps the most comic aspect of Feith's defense of Rice is his implicit attack on President Bush. During his now infamous October 7, 2002 saber-rattling address in Cincinnati, Bush made the same smoking gun/mushroom cloud reference. But in Bush's case, there were no qualifications about "uncertainty" or "different estimates" of Saddam's nuclear threat:

"Some citizens wonder, after 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now? And there's a reason. We've experienced the horror of September the 11th. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people. Our enemies would be no less willing, in fact, they would be eager, to use biological or chemical, or a nuclear weapon.

Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud...

...Understanding the threats of our time, knowing the designs and deceptions of the Iraqi regime, we have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring."

Less than three weeks ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its long delayed Phase 2 report on the Bush administration's uses - and misuses - of pre-war Iraq intelligence. As McClatchy noted, a bipartisan majority of the Committee concluded that "Bush knew Iraq claims weren't true." One of its key conclusions concerned administration claims regarding the Iraqi nuclear program, noting that "Bush and other officials failed to disclose that the State Department disputed that finding."

That would be the same State Department now run by Condoleezza Rice. So while General Tommy Franks may not be the brightest blub, his dim assessment of Douglas Feith continues to ring true.

As MediaMatters documented, McCain's daily-double came during an appearance on Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto (video here):

NEIL CAVUTO (host): Senator -- after a conflict means after the conflict, and many argue the conflict isn't over.

McCAIN: Well, then why was there a banner that said mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier?

Look, the -- I have said a long time that reconstruction of Iraq would be a long, long, difficult process, but the conflict -- the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished, and it's very appropriate. In two weeks, General Franks is going to come before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and we're going to have his overall assessment of the conflict. I think that's entirely appropriate because we'll be -- we'll be taking up the needs of the Defense Department and the men and women in the military on the Armed Services Committee.

But I'm looking for an overall review of the conflict, what we did right, what we did wrong, and what the needs are, including the issue of weapons of mass destruction. I remain confident that we will find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Despite the aggressive efforts of his campaign and its allies in the conservative echo chamber to rewrite the Arizona Senator's abysmal record on Iraq, the history shows John McCain like President Bush was sadly wrong at almost every turn in promoting the invasion and occupation of Iraq. From his predictions of a short war and claims U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators to his announcements of mission accomplished, his ongoing confusion over friend and foe in Iraq and so much more, McCain's is an unbroken legacy of error.

And no doubt, among John McCain's years of mistakes when it comes to Iraq, June 11, 2003 was among the very worst.

(For a detailed history of John McCain's reign of error on Iraq, see "McCain and Friends Rewrite History on Iraq.")

"The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein."

While Democratic and Republican committee members battle it out over the implications of the Phase 2 report, Pat Roberts' role in obstructing the investigation of the Bush administration's uses - and misuses - of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq is beyond dispute.

First, a little background. In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the absence of weapons of mass destruction there called into question President Bush's pre-war specter of a "gathering threat" (March 6, 2003), "the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud" (October 7, 2002), among other pre-war claims. By October 2003, the interim report of the Iraq Survey Group came up empty, findings confirmed by the final Duelfer Report a year later.

In response, President Bush and his Republican allies in the Senate took great pains to provide the illusion of fact-finding, while ensuring that no outcome detrimental to the President could come to pass before Election Day 2004, if ever.

Let's start in Congress. On June 20, 2003, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began its work. Led by Republican Chairman Pat Roberts (KS) and Democratic Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller (WV), the SSCI promised a two-phase report on the march to war in Iraq. Phase 1 would examine the failings of the American intelligence community. Phase 2 would investigate the uses of pre-war intelligence and whether the administration had manipulated it to create a causus belli. Conveniently for the Bush White House, the potentially damaging Phase 2 inquiry would not come until after the election.

Not surprisingly, the SSCI Phase 1 Report released in July 2004 sought to lay the blame for faulty intelligence at the feet of the CIA. Chairman Roberts concluded that "what the President and the Congress used to send the country to war was information that was...flawed" and "most of the key judgments in the October 2002 national intelligence estimate on Iraq's WMD programs were either overstated or were not supported by the raw intelligence reporting." But Roberts also presumed the conclusion of the as-yet-uncompleted Phase 2 report, "the committee found no evidence that the intelligence community's mischaracterization or exaggeration of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of politics or pressure."

During the very same press conference, Vice Chairman Rockefeller in response expressed his frustration and alarm over Roberts' statements:

"And I have to say, that there is a real frustration over what is not in this report, and I don't think was mentioned in Chairman Roberts' statement, and that is about the -- after the analysts and the intelligence community produced an intelligence product, how is it then shaped or used or misused by the policy-makers?� So again there's genuine frustration -- and Chairman Roberts and I have discussed this many times -- that virtually everything that has to do with the administration has been relegated to phase two. My hope is that we will get this done as soon as possible."

Rockefeller had good reason to worry. As it turns out, Senator Roberts simply had no intention of ever pursuing the Phase 2 inquiry into the Bush's administration's use - or misuse - of pre-war intelligence. On July 9, 2004, Roberts told reporters, "We will proceed with (that work in) phase two. It is a priority. I made my commitment and it will get done." But on March 10, 2005, a straight-faced Roberts changed his tune:

"It got to be a problem in regard to a subjective point of view. If you ask any member of the administration, 'Why did you make that declarative statement?' ... basically, the bottom line is, they believed the intelligence and the intelligence was wrong. In addition, we were in an even-numbered year and you know what that means. So, we sort of came to a crossroads and that [Phase 2] is basically on the back burner."

Roberts' stonewalling for the Bush administration didn't end there. Upon the release of the Silberman-Robb Commission Report, Roberts on March 31, 2005 concluded, "I don't think there should be any doubt that we have now heard it all regarding prewar intelligence. I think that it would be a monumental waste of time to replow this ground any further." Satisfied that the pretense of an investigation was provided while the Bush administration was still protected, Roberts added, "To go though that exercise, it seems to me, in a post-election environment--we didn't see how we could do that and achieve any possible progress. I think everybody pretty well gets it."

As for the Silberman-Robb Commission, it was designed to avoid the very issues Senator Roberts had so steadfastly refuse to investigate. As with the 9/11 Commission, President Bush initially opposed the formation of an independent panel to investigate Iraq WMD intelligence. And just as with the 9/11 Commission, Bush flip-flopped, caving to public pressure for an inquiry. But Bush's panel, led by Judge Laurence Silberman (the same judge who overturned Oliver North's felony conviction), would not include the subject of intelligence manipulation within its charter. The report concluded that the CIA had been "dead wrong" about Iraq WMD. But as Silberman himself noted:

"Well, on the [that] point, we duck. That is not part of our charter. We did not express any views on policymakers' use of intelligence -- whether Congress or the president. It wasn't part of our charter and indeed most of us didn't want to get into that issue because it's basically a political question and everybody knows -- you can look at the newspaper and see what people said and make your own judgment."

That judgment is what the Phase 2 report finally provided today. As McClatchy summarized, the report determined:

"Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information," the report concluded.

Claims by President Bush that Iraq and al Qaida had a partnership "were not substantiated by the intelligence."

The president and vice president misrepresented what was known about Iraq’s chemical weapons capabiliies.

Rumsfeld misrepresented what the intelligence community knew when he said Iraq's weapons productions facilities were buried deeply underground.

Cheney's claim that the intelligence community had confirmed that lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 was not true.

Four years ago, Pat Roberts with a straight face declared his committee's probe "a priority," adding of the critical Phase 2 report, "I made my commitment and it will get done." As it turned out, not so much. As for the truthfulness of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, that too was a fraud perpetrated on the American people.

Aided and abetted by the conservative echo chamber, John McCain this week launched a campaign to rewrite his dismal history of faulty forecasts and disastrous predictions on Iraq. Demonstrating that experience is truly no substitute for judgment, John McCain like President Bush was sadly wrong at almost every turn in promoting the invasion and occupation of Iraq. From his predictions of a short war and claims U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators to his announcements of mission accomplished, his ongoing confusion over friend and foe in Iraq and so much more, McCain's is an unbroken legacy of error.

But you'd never know it from his ill-fated "green scream" speech on Tuesday. Hoping to pre-empt Barack Obama's historic victory, McCain feebly tried to distance himself from President Bush and his calamitous war in Iraq:

"But he and I have not seen eye to eye on many issues. We've disagreed over the conduct of the war in Iraq...I disagreed strongly with the Bush administration's mismanagement of the war in Iraq. I called for the change in strategy that is now, at last, succeeding where the previous strategy had failed miserably."

In the Los Angeles Times that same day, the execrable Jonah Goldberg joined the right's extreme makeover of John McCain's disastrous record on Iraq. Declaring "there is one candidate who's been consistently right about the war, and it isn't the Democrat," Goldberg invented a fictional McCain at odds with President Bush from the outset of the war:

"Meantime, there was the supposedly dogmatic McCain challenging Bush's approach to Iraq nearly from the get-go."

As the history shows, not so much...

If nothing else, John McCain is an irony producing machine. On the very day Scott McClellan described the Bush administration "propaganda" used to sell an "unnecessary war" in Iraq, talking points McCain himself regurgitated, the Arizona Senator challenged Barack Obama to join him on a Baghdad visit. More ironic still, John McCain hasn't merely been wrong at every turn about the war in Iraq; the closer he gets to the war zone itself, the more disastrously off-base he becomes.

That's the clear assessment from long-time CNN Baghdad correspondent, Michael Ware:

"I mean Senator McCain has been here, what, more than half a dozen times. And we've seen him get assessments of Iraq terribly wrong. So I wouldn't be hanging my hat on the fact that your opponent has only been here once."

But you don't need to take Ware's word for it. John McCain's will do quite nicely.

Just yesterday, for example, Mr. Straight Talk discussed the calm and serenity in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Sadly, McCain made his boast on the very day that Mosul was rocked by two suicide bombings:

"I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it's succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr city are quiet and it's long and it's hard and it's tough and there will be setbacks."

But McCain's fallacy of proximity is truly on display when he reports from the ground in Iraq. That is, the closer McCain gets to the action, the further he travels from the truth.

One of the more comic moments in McCain's history of misguided Iraq cheerleading came on April 1, 2007. (Literally April Fool's Day - you can't make this stuff up.) Wearing a bulletproof vest and guarded by "100 American soldiers, with three Black