McCain, the Surge, and 'verb tenses'

The Fact Checker
Washington Post

"I can tell you that it [the Surge] is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it's succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr City are quiet." -- John McCain, Town Hall meeting, May 28, 2008.

John McCain got ahead of events this week in claiming that the United States military has gone down to "pre-surge levels" in Iraq. That will not happen until later this year, even by the most optimistic scenario. He is also wrong about the city of Mosul being "quiet", unless you exclude car bombs and other mayhem. His advisers attempted to spin his remarks as a simple matter of "verb tense." But there is a big difference between "Mission Accomplished" and "We expect the mission to be accomplished soon."

The Facts

The McCain campaign organized a rapid-response conference call with reporters in an attempt to limit the fallout from the senator's erroneous claim that "we have drawn down to pre-surge levels" in Iraq. The Obama folks pointed out that there are at present around 155,000 troops in Iraq, compared to a January 2007 force level of 128,569. The Pentagon is planning to get down to 140,000 by the end of July.

In a conference call with reporters, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann said the issue was a "question of semantics," and that McCain would have been right if he had said that the Pentagon had "taken a decision" to draw down the troops or was in the process of drawing them down.

But verb tenses matter, particularly in the case of Iraq, where it is very difficult to predict what is going to happen next week, let alone next month. By the Scheunemann standard of linguistic analysis, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the Bush administration's claim of "Mission Accomplished" back in May 2003. As we now know, a few things happened after that date to make the claim somewhat premature.

Taking a decision to do something and actually implementing it are two very different matters. To claim the contrary reminds me of the motto from the Ministry of Information in George Orwell's 1984: "He who controls the past controls the future; and he who controls the present controls the past."

(Continued here.)