In an interview with Fortune
magazine, Sen. John McCain's chief strategist, Charlie Black, concedes with
"startling candor" that another terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be a big
benefit for the Arizona senator's campaign.
Said Black: "Certainly it would be a big advantage to him."
This is the kind of remark the Kark Rove was famous for.
It was also similar to the remark that George W. Bush made after the 9/11 event:
"I just hit the Trifecta" refering to the two towers in the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon attack. (A trifecta is when you hold the winning ticket for the first
three horses crossing the finish line in the Kentucky Derby.)
John
McCain, Iraq, and the Eyewitness Fallacy
March 27, 2008
John McCain's glowing post-visit
assessment of conditions in Iraq, and Hillary Clinton's hyperbolically harrowing recollections
of her 1996 trip to Bosnia both stand as shining examples of what the British writer
Malcolm Muggeridge dubbed "the eyewitness fallacy."
In a brilliant essay, Muggeridge described public figures
of strong conviction throughout history -- many of them greatly admired and well-meaning
-- who, in eyewitness accounts, saw what they wanted to see, and became what they wanted
to be.
"They must believe a lie who see with, not through,
the eye," Blake wrote. Muggeridge took this one step further, saying that many
eyewitnesses see things with the glass eye they have fixed into their skulls -- and then
fervently believe what this glass eye registers.
Surely McCain was seeing the "surge is working"
glass eye he has fixed in his skull when
he told a town hall crowd this week, "We're succeeding. I don't care what anybody
says." And McCain backed up his claims with what he clearly considers his trump card:
"I've seen the facts on the ground."
Well, he was just in Iraq for the eighth
time since the war began, so he must know what he's talking about, right? Or was he
merely seeing what he wanted to see, in order to become what he so desperately wants to
be?
The most memorable example of McCain seeing what he
wanted to see, of course, was his infamous stroll through Baghdad's central market last
April, which he offered as proof of improved security. Remember the facts on the
ground eyewitness account of his traveling companion, Rep. Mike Pence?
It was just like "a normal outdoor market in Indiana
in the summertime," reported Pence.
Take away the 100 soldiers in armored
Humvees and the three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships circling above and
his comparison was spot on.
Rep. Lindsay Graham, who accompanied McCain and Pence
("I bought five rugs for five bucks," he said of the market),
returned home and later
predicted that, based on what he'd witnessed firsthand, "within the next weeks,
not months, there will be a major breakthrough" on political reconciliation.
Given that Graham had seen the facts on the ground, it's
shocking how that major breakthrough failed to break through.
Clearly, seeing Iraq with a glass eye is not limited to
John McCain. Indeed, it seems that glass eyes are standard issue for most politicians and
journalists visiting the war zone. You get a flak jacket, a pair of desert boots,
and an implantable glass eyeball.
"About two-thirds of the country is in really pretty
good shape," reported
Sen. Joe Lieberman upon returning from a two-day visit to Iraq in November 2005.
"Overall, I came back encouraged." So he was able to assess how things
were going in a country of over 167,000 square miles in 2 days? And what were the
keys to his being encouraged? According to AP, it was "a profusion of cell
phones and satellite TV dishes on rooftops." McCain has his "facts on the
ground." For Lieberman, it's all about the waves in the air.
His eyewitness observations empowered him with the same
predictive accuracy that Graham demonstrated: Lieberman held out high hopes for a
"significant" withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2006. It's now March 2008.
And it's not just pro-war cheerleaders like Lieberman,
Graham, and McCain. Even anti-war Democrats are susceptible to the eyewitness fallacy.
"I think the surge is working," reported Jack Murtha after
a November 2007 trip to Iraq.
"The military aspects of President Bush's new
strategy in Iraq," said Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin in an August 2007
statement released jointly with Sen. John Warner, "appear to have produced some
credible and positive results." Levin's assessment, like Lieberman's was based
on "a very productive two-day visit to Iraq."
Then there is Hillary Clinton, who during a February 2005
trip to Iraq, said that a
wave of suicide attacks was "an indication of [the insurgency's] failure."
On her trip, apparently booked by Lieberman's travel agent, Clinton focused on what
she at the time thought would help her be what she one day wanted to be, and saw what she
wanted to see: "I think you can look at the country as a whole and see that
there are many parts of Iraq that are functioning quite well."
But was she really able to "look at the country as a
whole"? According to USA Today, Clinton made that assessment based on
time spent only in the
heavily fortified Green Zone. Prior to her appraisal, her only other glimpse of
Baghdad "came from the relative safety of U.S. military helicopters that ferried
[Clinton and other Senators] from the airport."
This is a huge part of the problem with these eyewitness
accounts: they tend to be tightly controlled and, in the words of a former Army vice chief
of staff, "very limited" in scope. According to an April 2007 story in
the New York Times, "Members rarely spend more than a night in Iraq,
often flying back to Kuwait or Jordan at the end of the day. The trips are heavy on
meetings with American military and embassy officials, with almost no opportunities for
unscripted encounters with regular Iraqis."
So, safely ensconced in the Green Zone, their eyewitness
accounts deeply influenced by what they are being told by military officials, visiting
politicians frequently start seeing Iraq through rose-colored glasses.
And when they do venture out of the Green Zone in armored
convoys, they are often taken to showcase neighborhoods the military has spruced up and
fortified -- the Iraqi equivalent of the bustling farms reporters were regularly taken to
in Stalin's Soviet Union to mask the famine and deprivation afflicting the country.
Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic Senator from Rhode
Island, whose first visit to Iraq was a 36-hour trip last March, managed to see without a
glass eye, likening the experience to "drilling a tiny, tiny, little core sample out
of some vast geologic mass and then drawing conclusions from it."
So our politicians hunker down in the Green Zone, pay
drive-by visits to Iraqi Potemkin villages, and then make grand pronouncements about the
state of the country and the success of the surge.
And we are expected to dutifully accept their eyewitness
accounts as truth. After all, they, like John McCain, have "seen the facts on the
ground."
"It is not surprising," wrote Muggeridge,
"that Pilate did not wait for an answer when he asked his famous question: 'What is
truth?' He, too, had doubtless been studying eyewitness reports, including, of course,
that of Judas Iscariot."
Was John McCain Really a
"Maverick"?
NARAL created the website Meet the Real McCain (www.MeetTheRealMcCain.com),
that asks visitors to learn about the Republican's record and send the information along
to friends. "The REAL John McCain is not the "moderate maverick" the
pundits like to swoon over," explains the website. "The REAL McCain has spent
the last 25 years amassing one of the worst anti-choice voting records in Congress."
Inherent in efforts to portray McCain's true position as
being at odds with his moderate reputation is the suggestion that the senator is
unprincipled and opportunistic. The flip-flopping charge was even brought up during his
party's primaries, particularly regarding Bush's tax cuts (McCain opposed them in 2001 but
he now wants them to be made permanent).
Democrats learned in 2004 that a candidate being
associated with flip-flopping can transform his strongest advantage (a reputation as a
pragmatist) into his biggest liability. Democrats also learned that getting the charge to
stick requires it be leveled with compulsive repetition. And they will need to be even
more repetitive this year. McCain, after all, is already well-known by voters, and that
makes him that much harder to define. In 2004, few general election voters had a clear
opinion of John Kerry and the multi-million spring and summer GOP spending spree
introduced him to voters before he had a chance to develop his own narrative.
Obama likes to say that the "Somewhere along the
line, the Straight Talk Express lost some wheels." The DNC is also doing its part to
denounce McCain's inconsistencies, releasing a number of web videos centered on this
theme.
"When voters look at McCain they are going to see a
pandering politician," said LaVera. He pointed to McCain's turning his back on the
FEC and his relying on lobbyists despite his championing campaign finance as evidence of
McCain's double-talk. "Only when it stood his political interests" did he take
courageous positions, argued LaVera.
Another website is: 'McCain Debates' which
features the Arizona Senator debating (and contradicting) himself on a variety of issues.
At the end of every "round" an image of Bush offers McCain a thumbs-up,
tying the two Republicans together as tightly as possible.
GO TO JOHN MCCAIN AND THE
LOBBYISTS
GO TO JOHN MCCAIN
