The announcement today that the United States will deploy up to 15,000 more troops to Afghanistan is just the latest signal of the Pentagon's seeming support for Barack Obama's strategy to fight Al Qaeda in the region. Following by just weeks Obama's latest call to send at least two more brigades of American troops there, […]

Hoping to bolster support for the surge in Iraq, John McCain over the past year has frequently touted the safe streets of Baghdad. In April 2007, McCain boasted of neighborhoods "you and I could walk through." By March 2008, he reminded us that "there's problems in America with safe neighborhoods as we well know." And […]

Republican presidential nominee John McCain is fond of claiming, "I know how to win wars." Apparently, he also has ideas about how to start them. In the fall of 2001, McCain suggested the recent anthrax attacks that so terrified Americans might be a perfect pretext for war with Iraq. That revelation comes via ThinkProgress in […]

This weekend, John McCain launched an all-out war against Barack Obama's fitness to be commander-in-chief. In Denver on Friday, McCain claimed that in supporting the January 2007 surge in Iraq, he passed "a real-time test for a future commander-in-chief" his Democratic rival supposedly failed. That same day, McCain insisted to CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "I know […]

On Tuesday, Time columnist Joe Klein labeled as "shockingly unpresidential" John McCain's accusation that Barack Obama "would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign." But in announcing "I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate," Klein spoke a day too soon. As it turns out, McCain would […]

To John McCain's dismay, the chorus of voices bolstering Barack Obama's call for a strategic refocus from Iraq to Afganistan just keeps growing. Just one day before Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki indisputably endorsed Obama's time frame for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, General David Petraeus reported that the diminished Al Qaeda threat there was being […]

Neocon godfather Irving Kristol once famously said that "a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality." By that standard, the political right will need to coin an altogether new term to describe John McCain in the wake of the beating he has taken over the past several days. In the span of just […]

In response to Barack Obama's address today on Iraq and Afghanistan, Republican presidential nominee John McCain declared, "I know how to win wars." Now for the first time, the man who brought you Ahmad Chalabi and 100 years in Iraq offers all his war-winning secrets in How to Win Wars for Dummies. Insightful chapters like […]

The news that President Bush will begin drawing down U.S. troops in Iraq below pre-surge levels this fall is being greeted as an October surprise for John McCain. But even with the successes of the surge, events on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan are validating Barack Obama's call for a strategic refocus on Afghanistan. […]

If John McCain has many more days like Tuesday, his only chance to get to the White House will be as a tourist. On the same day he dropped jaws with his joke about killing Iranians with cigarettes, McCain amazingly slammed Social Security as "an absolute disgrace." Then even as McCain's first-term balanced budget pledge […]