McCain's Foreign Policy Descent

Ask nearly anyone in the media, and they would tell you that McCain's strong point is his foreign policy expertise. That would be bad enough in a campaign that most people think will be decided on domestic economic issues, but it seems like McCain and his handlers are determined to destroy even his credibility on foreign policy.

There have been a series of gaffes, some of them almost unbelievable. First, McCain decides it's a good idea to take a hard line on the Iraq War. Knowing that about 70% of the country believes Iraq was a mistake and wants to find a way to leave, he announces that it's OK with him if we stay in Iraq for a hundred years.

For most candidates, that would be a big enough gaffe to last a long time. But this is John Sidney McCain, and he was just beginning. He then goes into a series of mistakes that any person with even a rudimentary knowledge of current events would never make.

First, he can't seem to keep the Shiites and the Sunnis straight in Iraq and the Middle East. More than once, he tried to tell us that Iran was supporting and arming al-Queda in Iraq. The problem is that Iran is a Shiite regime and al-Queda is composed of Sunnis, and the two groups absolutely hate each other.

Then he tells two crowds on two different days they he doesn't like the way Russia is treating Czechloslovakia. You would think his campaign people would have corrected him after the first time, but evidently they didn't know either that Czechloslovakia hasn't existed for 15 years. In 1993, it split into Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Just this week, McCain told ABC news that things were not going well on the Iraq-Pakistan border. They didn't call him on it, but the two countries don't share a border. Maybe someone ought to get McCain a high-school geography book.

But these pale in comparison to his current blunder. He decided to point out that he's been to Iraq several times, while Obama hasn't been in years. He virtually dared Obama to go to Iraq.

Sadly for McCain, Obama took him up on the challenge. So this week, Obama visits Afghanistan and Iraq and gets some great media coverage, while McCain flounders in this country with little coverage.

Then as if on cue, Iraqi leader Maliki tells the press that he agrees with Obama's timetable for American troops to leave Iraq. His handlers later realized he had "dissed" Bush with the statement, and tried to say he had been misunderstood. That would have been easier to believe if the words hadn't been translated by Maliki's own translators, and if Maliki hadn't said several times he wants a timetable for withdrawal.

Even Bush seems to have jumped the McCain ship on Iraq. He is now also talking about "time horizons". Call it what you will, but it sounds suspiciously like a timetable to me. McCain has been left swaying in the wind and muttering about the surge working and victory being near. But is it?

So far this year, 220 Americans have been killed in Iraq, and well over 4,000 Iraqis have been killed. If this is what McCain calls victory, do we really want him running the war?

For someone who's supposed to have foreign policy expertise, foreign policy seems to have been a disaster for John Sidney McCain in this campaign.