The Gaffe

I went to bed early and haven’t really watched Letterman in years. So it’s not a surprise that I missed John McCain’s remark that American lives have been “wasted” in Iraq. Nor is it a surprise that McCain would be swift to retract his use of that word. Certainly it’s a bad thing to say to troops in the field that their brothers’ and sisters’ lives are being “wasted” and the deaths have pointless. (But it would be much worse to tell these young men and women that their lives are being risked, and in some cases lost, to provide domestic cover for the consequences of a reckless geopolitical gamble, which the most cynical among us would say is what is really going on.)

Still -- if you really think the war in Iraq is hopeless, that the country will never reach an acceptable level of civility and peace, that the country is doomed to Balkanize and at least portions of it turn hostile to the United States, then what word do you use to describe what’s happening to Americans over there? McCain, however, does not have the luxury of being able to ask that rhetorical question the way Barack Obama could have. Saying that a particular stratagem will “waste” lives or has “wasted” lives requires that you be a critic of the stratagem in the first place. Not only did McCain vote to authorize the use of military force in Iraq, he’s turned in to the President’s biggest cheerleader for the 20,000-troop “surge” that, as far as I can tell from reading the news, is not doing anything to pacify the near-daily acts of mindless religious violence in Baghdad.