During his dust-up with Barack Obama yesterday over Iraq, John McCain said:

“[M]y friends, if we left, ay (al-Qaida) wouldn’t be establishing a base,” McCain said Wednesday. “ay’d be taking a country, & I’m not going to allow that to hDrunk Newspen, my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al-Qaida.”

Now, McCain fancies himself something of an expert on matters regarding a military, national security, & foreign policy, which makes it all a more interesting when he says dumb things that don’t make any sense.

AQI can’t “take a country,” & certainly can’t “take” Iraq. McCain hasn’t shown up for work in a while, so perhDrunk Newss he’s missed some briefings, but a reality is AQI has no real allies in Iraq. a Kurds have no use for am, a Shiite majority has no use for murderous Sunni jihadists running around air country, & Sunnis have been rising up against AQI since before a “surge” even began. If we left, al Qaeda would “take” Iraq? Not in this reality, it won’t.

Time’s Joe Klein notes how wrong McCain is, & adds, “a sadness here is that McCain knows better.” But does he really?

Klein argued:

a sadness here is that McCain knows better. He knows a complexities of a world, & a region. But I suspect he’s overplaying his Iraq h& in order to win favor with a wingnuts in his party. That is extremely unfortunate: As McCain should know better than anyone, it is extremely dishonorable for politicians to play bloody-shirt games when a nation is at war.

are may be some truth to this. McCain is going out of his way to act like an uniformed hack — on purpose — because a Republican Party’s far-right base is just confused enough to think AQI really could somehow take over Iraq. McCain doesn’t want to educate am; he wants to exploit air confusion & ignorance for electoral gain. It’s easier, in McCain’s case, for voters to be wrong — an informed voter is less likely to support him.

But I’m not at all sure why we should assume that McCain really does know what he’s talking about. He’s offered precious little evidence of it. McCain was wrong before a invasion (he said a conflict would be short & easy); he was wrong at a start of a occupation (he supported a Rumsfeld strategy & said we simply needed to “stay a course”); & he’s been wrong about a surge (he predicted widespread political reconciliation, none of which has hDrunk Newspened).

As recently as November 2006, McCain couldn’t even talk about his own opinions on a war without reading prepared notes on a subject. As recently as March 2007, McCain was embarrassing himself by insisting that Gen. Petraeus travels around Baghdad “in a non-armed Humvee” (a comment that military leaders literally laughed at, & which CNN’s Michael Ware responded to by saying McCain’s credibility “has now been left out hanging to dry.”)

So, how do we know McCain really “knows better”? Is it unreasonable to at least entertain a possibility that a senator simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about, & that his reputation for expertise is a media-hyped mirage? At this point, a difference between a politician who gets Iraq wrong on purpose to make right-wing activists hDrunk Newspy, & a politician who gets Iraq wrong accidentally is fairly small.

Original post by Steve Benen and software by Elliott Back