Lets strip off the bullshit and extraneous garbage and get down to the core issue of this thread.
McCain is OK with staying the course in Iraq for another 100 years. But somewhat qualifies that with one caveat, with an if and only if Iraq starts resembling the past occupations of Japan and Germany. And will not cost us billions of dollars per month with a huge monthly death toll to sweeten the deal.
And McCain can point to the historical example of Japan and Germany. They were wise investments and quickly did not costs us bottomless blood and treasure to maintain. And partly due to the wise decisions made by a previous generation of US leaders that are now consumed. So if nothing else, neither McCain or anyone else alive to day can take any credit for their previous wisdom. Or stupidities if one wants to argue that case.
Then one can look at the short term five year history of Iraq and compare it with it with Japan and Germany. And for a vast majority of us, the differences are quite clear. The smartness of our previous leaders were replaced with the dumbest MF's imaginable. And worse yet, we fired or ignored the people with brains like Shinseki, and empowered the brainless. And while our butchers bill in blood is not all that high compared to the 58,000 of Vietnam, the butchers bill for the Iraqis is immense. But in terms of national treasure, the costs is arguably over 2 trillion dollars already. And to make a simplistic argument I don't really believe is valid, the dual acts of the democrats retaking congress in 11/2006 and the firing of Dumsfelds ignited a smarter strategy. And with that smarter strategy, the last nine months has at least reduced the butchers will in terms of blood on all sides. Maybe starting Iraq down the road towards being like the German and Japanese occupations even though the cost in national treasure has not reduced a bit.
But as Einstein pointed out, human stupidity is maybe infinite. And now Malki has taken matters into his own hands and bring Iraq to a brink. And the new Iraq of the past nine months could erase all gains made and go back to looking anything like the occupations of Japan or Germany. Or this stupidity could just be temporary and the new Iraq of lowered violence could resume.
In short we do not know, at this point in time, which way it will go.
So in that sense, we must let FUTURE EVENTS be our arbiter of the McCain contention.
If Iraq can de escalate and resume a period of ever diminishing death tolls, it may be that McCain has made a credible statement. And John McCain may not be totally self deluded.
If Iraq descends into a long period of increasing violence and open civil war, we will know McCain is self deluded and offers nothing to the American people.
Since we will likely know the answer to that question long before the general election, why try to tout anything?