McCain's amazing Iraq somersault

The "straight talker" has trashed anyone who dared suggest a withdrawal date. Now he's floated one of his own.

By Joe Conason
Salon.com

May 16, 2008 | For a straight-talking maverick, John McCain certainly knows how to parse and pander. During this year's campaign he has already flipped and flopped on such major issues as taxation and immigration to pacify the Republican base -- but now he has executed a stunning reversal of position on Iraq war policy, which he has often touted as the symbol of his political steadfastness.

The man who scorched poor Mitt Romney because he once alluded to a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops promised on Wednesday to bring them home by January 2013, or less than five years from now. We will have "won" by then, so why not?

The Columbus, Ohio, speech into which McCain tucked this convenient guarantee was a happy description of the utopia we will inhabit following his first term as president. Most of these assertions are hardly worth arguing over, since the candidate provided little or no explanation for how he hopes to achieve drastically reduced healthcare costs, vastly improved public education, or any of his other enticing promises.

But Iraq is a different matter, because McCain has attacked both Democrats and Republicans repeatedly for daring to suggest a date for withdrawal. Ever since the last time he discussed how long he expected U.S. troops to remain in Iraq -- when he made the mistake of mentioning a hundred years as a possibility -- his campaign has complained bitterly that his remarks were distorted. To avoid anything like that happening again, here is what he said in Columbus on the subject of Iraq, in full:

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