Columnist - John Sammon
John McCain said Obama doesn’t seem to understand the price of failure in Iraq.

The price of failure in Iraq?

Let’s dissect this one statement. The price of failure? That means we can still fail. I thought McCain said the surge was a success. If we can still fail in Iraq, that means it (the surge) wasn’t very much of a success. Not a decisive success. It was a success, but not decisive. If it wasn’t decisive, how good was it? Let’s be generous to McCain and his philosophical mentor Bush and say the surge (flooding Baghdad with more troops) temporarily tamped down violence. In that one area.

A kind of band aid, it gives one the allusion temporarily that things are better, in one area of the country. Temporarily, it makes Bush and McCain look good. Or at least, better. The bad guys either lay low, or move their act somewhere else until the surge goes away.

If we can still fail in Iraq, if Obama is elected as McCain suggests, then how on the other hand can we achieve success? Though he hasn’t spelled anything out specifically because he doesn’t know himself, let’s once again be generous and assume McCain means “success” to mean a happy and prosperous and peaceful Iraq with a stable government.

When will that happen and how will it happen? Nobody knows.

McCain’s answer clearly is to achieve the middle. At least for the future. Keep troops in the country for the next fifty years. If we keep troops there, we haven’t succeeded, but we haven’t failed either. We’re still supposedly in control.
It’s the middle option. Neither success or failure. The status quo.

Like the surge, avoidance of failure gives the false impression we’re in control of the country, though not in compete control.

It’s an allusion, smoke and mirrors.

• McCain says he is the candidate for “change” (the new in-word).

• McCain is for offshore oil drilling in scenic areas (so is oil man Bush).

• McCain is the candidate for change.

• McCain is for a permanent occupation of Iraq (so is Bush).

• McCain is the candidate for change.

• McCain wants to let the free market somehow take care of global warming (so does Bush).Bush ignored global warming for eight years and finally last week admitted it’s a reality.

McCain is for change?

Where’s the change? Maybe McCain means pocket change.

McCain speaks in that humorless low monotone that hints he’s a determined man’s man (if you’re a hero singled out by destiny, you talk in a very serious manner). He drones on endlessly about how he was right in the very beginning and knew all the time the surge in Iraq would work even though Iraq was originally launched as a war to take out false weapons of mass destruction and is now explained as a war to end violence (the truth is whatever McCain says it is).

To McCain and Bush, change is to do nothing different, and success is simply to avoid failure, by failing from the very beginning and saying it isn’t (failure).

McCain is the candidate for no change.

Copyright 2008 Sammonsays.

   Image - Courtesy: Gary Varvel

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