In an article for the May 18 edition of The New York Times Magazine, political writer Matt Bai claimed that “whether you agree with him or not, there is a notable honesty to” Sen. John McCain's position on the war in Iraq. Bai wrote: “Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have spent the primary season competing over who's more eager to ship out of Iraq, but everyone associated with their campaigns knows that withdrawal will not happen quickly or without peril. McCain's pitch, on the other hand, is as straightforward as it is stripped of political charm.” But undermining Bai's characterization of a “notable honesty” in McCain's position on Iraq are numerous instances in which McCain has made false or inconsistent assertions on Iraq.

McCain's falsehoods and inconsistent statements on Iraq include the following:

• McCain has repeatedly claimed during the campaign that he called for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. In fact, while McCain expressed "no confidence" in Rumsfeld in 2004, the Associated Press reported at the time that McCain “said his comments were not a call for Rumsfeld's resignation.” Further, when Fox News host Shepard Smith specifically asked McCain, “Does Donald Rumsfeld need to step down?” on November 8, 2006 -- hours before President Bush announced Rumsfeld's resignation -- McCain responded that it was “a decision to be made by the president.” After The Washington Post uncritically reported McCain's claim that he called for Rumsfeld's resignation, a subsequent Post article noted that "[a] McCain spokesman acknowledged this week that that was not correct. 'He did not call for his resignation,' said the campaign's Brian Rogers. 'He always said that's the president's prerogative.' "

• McCain repeatedly made the false claim that Iran was helping to train Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq. After McCain twice made the claim to reporters during a March 18 press conference in Amman, Jordan -- one day after he made the claim during an interview with nationally syndicated radio host Hugh Hewitt -- Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who was accompanying McCain on the trip, alerted McCain, and McCain stated: “I'm sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”

• McCain falsely suggested that Sen. Barack Obama had said that Al Qaeda currently has no presence in Iraq. During the February 26 Democratic presidential debate, Obama said that as president he would act if “Al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq” after U.S. troops are withdrawn. In comments that were widely reported, McCain mocked Obama, saying: “I have some news. Al Qaeda is in Iraq. It's called Al Qaeda in Iraq.” But, contrary to McCain's suggestion, Obama did not say that Al Qaeda currently has no presence in Iraq. He was speaking of the future, saying: "[I]f Al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad."
• Moreover, The New York Times itself has written that, contrary to McCain's assertion following Obama's comments, McCain does not expect that Al Qaeda would take control of Iraq if the U.S. withdrew. On April 19, The Times reported that "[f]ew, including Mr. McCain, expect Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia [Iraq], a Sunni group, to take control of Shiite-dominated Iraq in the event of an American withdrawal. The situation they fear and which Mr. McCain himself sometimes fleshes out is that an American withdrawal would be celebrated as a triumph by Al Qaeda and create instability that the group could then exploit to become more powerful."

• In 2006, McCain “commend[ed]” Bush for providing the public with what McCain characterized as an “honest assessment” of the situation in Iraq. McCain made his comments commending Bush in the wake of controversy generated by remarks he made at a campaign event for then-Sen. Mike DeWine (R-OH) three days earlier, during which McCain criticized the administration, stating: " 'Stuff happens,' 'Mission Accomplished,' 'Last throes,' 'A few dead-enders.' I'm as more familiar with those statements than anyone else because it grieves me so much that we have not told the American people how tough and difficult this task would be."

From Bai's article in the May 18 edition of The New York Times Magazine:

JOHN McCAIN HAS NEVER been very good at political artifice. Like every politician I've known, McCain will sometimes surrender to the cheap ploy or prevarication when the moment demands it, but it is often with a smirk or a wince, some hard-to-miss signal that he knows he's up to no good. In the more serious instances when he knows he has put expedience over principle (his reversal on the Bush tax cuts just in time for the campaign season may well turn out to be one of them), he has an almost therapeutic need to acknowledge it later, as he did when he told South Carolinians, weeks after losing the brutal primary there in 2000, that he had been wrong to defend the Confederate flag just to win their votes. And so, whether you agree with him or not, there is a notable honesty to his position on the war in Iraq. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have spent the primary season competing over who's more eager to ship out of Iraq, but everyone associated with their campaigns knows that withdrawal will not happen quickly or without peril. McCain's pitch, on the other hand, is as straightforward as it is stripped of political charm. We made a mess in Iraq, he says, but it's our mess now, and we have to stay on and fix it.

Ultimately, McCain is relying on the same strategy to achieve success both in Iraq and in the November election. In each endeavor, McCain is staking everything on the notion that the public, having seen the success of a new military strategy, can be convinced that the war is, in fact, winnable and worth the continued sacrifice. Absent that national retrenching, McCain admits that this war, like the one in Vietnam, is probably doomed. Near the end of our conversation in Tampa, I asked him if he would be willing to change course on Iraq if the violence there started to rise again. “Oh, we'd have to,” he replied. “It's not so much what McCain would do. American public opinion will not tolerate such a thing.”

The problem is that there's actually no evidence to suggest that a reduction in casualties in Iraq will translate into a greater public tolerance for a protracted engagement there. According to Gallup, Americans' confidence that the surge is improving the situation on the ground rose sharply between last summer and this spring; 40 percent of those polled in March said the surge is working, compared with 22 percent last July, while 38 percent said it was making no difference, down from 51 percent last year. For McCain, that's no small measure of vindication. And yet, during the same period, even as optimism about the new strategy grew, the percentage of Americans who say they want a timetable for gradual withdrawal -- those, in other words, who agreed primarily with the two Democratic candidates -- remained almost exactly the same, rising to 41 percent from 39 percent. (Another 18 percent have consistently said they want to get out right away.) Nor has the success of the surge in reducing American casualties done a thing to convince the public that the invasion made sense in the first place. According to another Gallup poll released a few weeks ago, 63 percent of Americans now believe it was a mistake to go to war -- an all-time high.

It doesn't help that McCain has never put his argument for staying into some larger context that might explain what he really means by “winning” the war in Iraq. If you ask him to define victory, his answer is that Americans soldiers will have stopped dying, and that the Iraqi military and government will be functioning on their own. That would be a great day, no doubt, but surely the overarching purpose of a war can't be to stop more soldiers from dying in it. (On the one notable occasion when McCain tried to put a more hopeful spin on progress in Iraq, during a visit there last spring, the result was an unqualified public-relations debacle: strolling through an outdoor market in Baghdad market wearing a flak jacket and surrounded by what seemed liked a regiment of U.S. soldiers, McCain declared that life for Iraqis was at last returning to normal. The next day, by some accounts, 21 Shiite workers at the market were abducted and killed.) McCain's main reason for continuing on in Iraq seems to be that we're already there and must not accept defeat, and that's an argument that probably feels all too familiar to many Americans who lived through a decade of aimless war in Vietnam, to no discernible end.